Issue date: 10/2/08 Section: News

Media Credit: John Young

An Eastern professor has been awarded a grant worth over $378,000 to study the global warming effects of fire.

Neil Pederson, assistant professor of biology at Eastern, will use a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to uncover patterns of global warming by studying the impact of fires on the climate and ecology of Northern Mongolia.

Last week the NSF awarded $378,616 to Eastern for Pederson's proposal, "Collaborative Research: Fire, Climate and Forest History in Mongolia." Pederson and his colleagues hope their fire damage data will relate to past temperatures and precipitation.

"We want to compare the data we obtain in Mongolia to research in the western U.S. which indicates that frequency of fire is related to climate," Pederson said.

The similarity in Mongolian climate to the area east of the Rocky Mountains made the decision to study Asia a no-brainer for Pederson.

"Why not take that idea and apply it to Mongolia? They have an uninterrupted record of fire," he said.

His research team includes Peter Brown from Rocky Mountain Tree Ring Laboratory in Fort Collins, Colo. Brown said the data obtained could support a global warming theory, as drought and fire damage can be determined from tree ring samples.

"We want to see if any changes in recent decades…may be related to warming," Brown said. "We are expecting to see increased fire activity, since more drought equals more fire."

The significance of tree rings has been known for some time; even DaVinci was aware of it. But the exact science is somewhat new.

Brown said tree ring science offers a precise way to measure drought and fire conditions.

"We find fire scars-injuries left in trees when burned at the base," he said. "These are low severity grass fires where the trees were in the way. It gets recorded in the tree ring series, and we can use that data to help reconstruct climate."

Although ice cores cover a greater span of time, corals and tree ring cores date to the exact year. The technique was used to successfully pinpoint a drought that radically affected the settlers in Jamestown, Va., and the lost colony of Roanoke.

Mongolia trees contain an untainted record of fire history, unlike in the U.S., where fires are suppressed by land management agencies.

The $500,000 project was initially rejected last year by the NSF as too vague, but was accepted upon clarification and resubmission in January.

In addition to Pederson and Brown, the team includes Baatarbileg Nachin and Amy Hessel.

Nachin is head of the department of forestry at the National University of Mongolia. He will supervise and coordinate the research in the field.

West Virginia University's Hessel was awarded $191,138 for her part in the project and will be coming to Eastern next month to give a presentation on the subject.

Her lecture, titled "Fire as an Integrating Concept in Earth Science," is scheduled for Oct. 17 in the Memorial Science building.

While they are in a sense duplicating work already done out west, Pederson stressed the importance of repeatable results as the backbone of scientific investigation.

"That's how science works," he said. "When you get information that you think is cool, it's like, 'So what? Let's test it again.'"

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