An article titled “Assessing the usage of flammability experiments and charcoal reflectance for interpreting the late Holocene record of fire” has just been published in Quaternary International. The first author of the publication is Alicja Bonk, and the co-author team includes Wojciech Tylmann.
The authors proposed a new approach to reconstructing past fires by combining the analysis of charcoal degradation with measurements of its reflectance. This combination makes it possible not only to determine whether the burned biomass was fresh or degraded, but also to infer the intensity of ancient fires – from low-intensity surface litter fires to more severe surface and crown fires. The method was tested on material from Lake Żabińskie, integrating the results with pollen data.
Bonk A., Belcher C.M., Wacnik A., Tylmann W., 2026, Assessing the usage of flammability experiments and charcoal reflectance for interpreting the late Holocene record of fire. Quat. Int. 756, 110095. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2025.110095 LINK