COSAM News Articles 2024 09 Auburn paleoclimatologist seeks to extract fire records through $1 million NSF award

Auburn paleoclimatologist seeks to extract fire records through $1 million NSF award

Published: 10/01/2024

By: Maria Gebhardt

Richard Vachula, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Auburn University, is the recipient of a $1.03 million award from the National Science Foundation Division of Earth Sciences for the project Collaborative Research: Resolving past fire-climate relationships to understand future fire potential in eastern United States.

As the principal investigator (PI), Vachula will receive $556,655 for Auburn over three years. His co-PIs are Nick Balascio, associate professor at Bates College, and Ambarish Karmalkar, assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island.

Vachula will be conducting paleo-fire research that will result in new fire records for regions throughout the eastern United States.

“Think of pages of a book,” Vachula said. “By analyzing ash, we can turn pages back through time and learn important information about fires during the most recent 12,000 years or the Holocene epoch.”

The research team will develop new fire records of ash preserved in sediment. Through extracting molecular components in the ash, they will be able to learn more about past wildfires to improve critical fire data.

“This research will improve our understanding through of fire in the eastern United States,” said Vachula. “The western United States has many fire records easily available.”   

This data directly has important implications for land managers and can impact national policies.

“Computer simulations that predict future climate change are fine-tuned by paleoclimate datasets,” he explained. “Data of the eastern side of the country, will provide more complex information to help future climate models.”

Vachula will work with the U.S. Geological Survey Climate Adaptation Science Centers to disseminate the team’s findings.

 

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