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Soil Charcoal in Old‐Growth Rain Forests from Sea Level to the Continental Divide
Author(s) -
Titiz Beyhan,
Sanford Robert L.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
biotropica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.813
H-Index - 96
eISSN - 1744-7429
pISSN - 0006-3606
DOI - 10.1111/j.1744-7429.2007.00327.x
Subject(s) - charcoal , transect , rainforest , radiocarbon dating , holocene , environmental science , sea level , geology , physical geography , oceanography , ecology , geography , archaeology , materials science , metallurgy , biology
Soil charcoal is an indicator of Holocene fires as well as a palaeoecological signature of pre‐Colombian land use in Neotropical rain forests. To document rain forest fire history, we examined soil charcoal patterns in continuous old‐growth forests along an elevational transect from sea level to the continental divide on the Atlantic slope of Costa Rica. At 10 elevations we sampled 1‐ha plots, using 16 cores/ha to collect 1.5‐m deep soil samples. We found charcoal in soils at every elevation, with total dry mass ranging from 3.18 g/m 2 at 2000‐m elevation to as much as 102.7 g/m 2 at 300 m. Soil charcoal is most abundant at the wettest lowland sites (60–500 m) and less at montane elevations (> 1000 m) where there is less rainfall. Between 30‐ and 90‐cm soil depth, soil charcoal is present consistently and every 1‐ha plot has charcoal evidence for multiple fire events. Radiocarbon dates range from 23,240 YBP at 1750‐m elevation to 140 YBP at 2600 m. Interestingly, none of the charcoal samples from 2600 m are older than 170 yr, which suggests that forests near the continental divide are relatively young replacement stands that have re‐established since the most recent localized volcanic eruption on Volcán Barva. We propose that these old‐growth forests have been disturbed infrequently but multiple times as a consequence of anthropogenic and natural fires.