5-8th December 2016 – Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Natural and human-driven fire regime and early land-cover changes in Central and Eastern Europe
Coordinators: Angelica Feurdean and Boris Vannière
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to announce an open call for letters of interest to participate in a workshop on “Natural and human-driven fire regime and early land-cover changes in Central and Eastern Europe”, for which a limited number of places are available. Early career scientists and researchers from Central and Eastern Europe who work on the topic are especially encouraged to apply (CEEFire_2016_annoucement).
Overview: The workshop will be held December 5-8th, 2016, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It is organized as part of a DFG -funded project ” Fire as a key driver of long-term ecosystem structure, functioning and biodiversity in Central Europe”, and is the second workshop of the PAGES’s Global Paleofire Working Group phase 2 (GPWG2) which aims to foster interdisciplinary collaborations between natural and archeological data experts and modelers with a particular focus on human impact on fire regime in Central and Eastern Europe since the Prehistory. The workshop consists of lectures and hand on tools to work with databases, primarily the Global Charcoal Database (GCD), in order to develop regional syntheses of patterns in paleofire activity, identify fire ecology questions and discuss the role of fire in early land use/ cover changes.
Aims: This workshop seeks to fill the gaps in our understanding of fire regime dynamics, under a range of past environmental conditions and anthropogenic land uses in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), a severely underrepresented region in GCD. We aim to unify charcoal records from this region and evaluate them in combination with other proxy-based and modelled data sets of past climate, vegetation, land cover. Such an approach will facilitate a critical evaluation of the key hypotheses regarding the linkages between fires, climate, vegetation, traditional human land uses and modern landscape management. We hope this workshop to: i) be a platform to introduce the GCD to the potential new contributors; ii) to encourage them to present their datasets and be part of planned topical syntheses; iii) but also to initiate new collaborative research using the database. The themes identified at this workshop will also foster the engagement of practitioners assisting fire management decision.
Financial support: There is no registration fee. Lunches and coffee breaks are covered for all attendees. Limited financial support is available from PAGES to supplement travel and accommodation particularly for early-career scientists and researchers from developing countries.
Logistics: The workshop is open to 25 participants maximum.
To apply and further information: Please contact by sending an email to Angelica Feurdean (angelica.feurdean@senckenberg.de) before September 15th 2016, indicating your affiliation, research topic and what you hope to contribute to the efforts. Please mention whether you will need funding support to attend the workshop.
