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Using fossilized charcoal to corroborate the Everglades fire history geodatabase

Metadata Updated: July 6, 2024

Fire in the Everglades National Park (ENP) has historically been influential in shaping the Everglades ecosystem. As a result, ENP has been documenting fire events since 1948, and these data have been incorporated into an Esri ArcGIS geodatabase (Smith, T.J. III, and others, 2015). According to this geodatabase, 757,078 hectares of wetlands burned from 1948 to 2011. The main type of vegetation that has burned is comprised of palustrine and estuarine wetlands; however, there are areas in ENP that are comprised of these wetlands but have no documented fire events. Consequently, scientists at the USGS St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center question the accuracy of the data in this geodatabase. The abundance of fossil charcoal in sediment cores has been used, historically, as a fire proxy so to test the accuracy of this data, USGS scientists examined fossil charcoal in sediment cores taken from six locations in ENP. Two of the cores were taken from areas with well-documented fire events and four cores where taken from areas with no documented fire events. USGS scientists also dated three of the cores using excess Lead-210 (210Pb). Based on charcoal abundance in these cores, USGS scientists were able to verify documented fire events in the geodatabase. Furthermore, the presence of fossil charcoal in cores from areas with no documented fire events indicate that fire events did, in fact, occur in these areas in 1948-1964 and 1950-1980. These findings indicate the presence of fire events that are undocumented in the Esri geodatabase and suggest that 210Pb-dating is a promising method for reconstructing a regional fire history.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date July 6, 2024

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI EDI

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date July 6, 2024
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
@Id http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/784003656ba71a9308eb338aeac74200
Identifier USGS:6f4b4597-a82f-423a-bd94-ea0549cccf1b
Data Last Modified 20210224
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://datainventory.doi.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 4bd9ee67-3ce9-4678-bbc2-850afe8ed2bb
Harvest Source Id 52bfcc16-6e15-478f-809a-b1bc76f1aeda
Harvest Source Title DOI EDI
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -81.004959857,25.316787508,-80.799153884,25.418556739
Publisher Hierarchy White House > U.S. Department of the Interior > U.S. Geological Survey
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 1c82631a8185e806e12b48b093e6f267a638c117a6ffc98c3c38770509979110
Source Schema Version 1.1
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