The North American tree-ring fire-scar network

Fire activity is increasing across much of North America, driven by climate change and human land use. Instrumental records of fire are too short to quantify patterns and drivers of fire regimes to accurately model future fire.  Tree-ring fire scars are sub-annually resolved and span centuries to millennia.  We present the newly compiled North American tree-ring fire-scar network (n = 2,548 sites). It spans biomes from northern Alaska to southern Mexico and from California to northeastern Canada, including 104 different tree species. The network spans a large range of climate space, topography, and human land use. It provides great potential for future research on spatio-temporal variability of the interactions between fire, climate, vegetation, and humans across the continent, particularly when combined with other networks (e.g., tree-ring reconstructions of climate, instrumental fire records, and historical records of human land use).