Data archive for: Fire-regime variability and ecosystem resilience over four millennia in a Rocky Mountain subalpine watershed

Wildfires strongly influence forest ecosystem processes, including carbon and nutrient cycling and vegetation dynamics. As fire activity increases under changing climate conditions, the ecological and biogeochemical resilience of many forest ecosystems remains unknown. To investigate the resilience of forest ecosystems to changing climate and wildfire activity over decades to millennia, we developed a 4800-yr high-resolution lake-sediment record from Silver Lake, Montana, USA (47.360° N, 115.566° W). Charcoal particles, pollen grains, element concentrations, and stable isotopes of C and N serve as proxies of past changes in fire, vegetation, and ecosystem processes such as nitrogen cycling and soil erosion, within a small subalpine forest watershed. A published lake-level history from Silver Lake provides a local record of paleohydrology. A trend toward increased effective moisture over the late Holocene coincided with a distinct shift in the pollen assemblage c. 1900 yr BP, resulting f..., Data are paleoenvironmental proxies from a lake-sediment core collected at Silver Lake, Montana, USA, in 2017 (47.360° N, 115.566° W). Sediments ages were estimated from a bayesian age-depth model developed in rbacon using dates from Pb210 analysis of near-surface sediments and radiocarbon dating of terrestrial macrofossils or concentrated charcoal. Sediment subsamples were taken contiguously at 0.5-cm intervals throughout the core, representing an average of 10 years per sample, for macroscopic charcoal analysis, XRF analysis, and elemental and stable isotope analysis of C and N. Pollen grains were extracted and identified at c. 100 yr intervals to characterize the relative abundances of terrestrial pollen types over time. Additional data from published studies were also used in the analysis: 

Parish, M. C., K. D. Wolf, P. E. Higuera, and B. N. Shuman. 2022. Holocene water levels of Silver Lake, Montana, and the hydroclimate history of the Inland Northwest. Quaternary Research:1–13. [..., All analyses are conducted in R v. 4.2.1. ,