Abstract: Humans have long used fire for land clearance, agriculture, hunting, and regenerating vegetation. However, colonial policies prioritized forests solely for timber, disrupting traditional fire management and leading to widespread fire suppression. These policies continue today under the banner of biodiversity conservation in many parts of India. While scientific advancements have improved our understanding of fire’s role in ecosystems, leading to prescribed fire management in many parts of the world, evidence-based research remains scarce for tropical forests in South and Southeast Asia, particularly in India. Additionally, there is also a long-standing debate that questions whether the seasonally dry tropical forests—recognized as the first frontier of human land-use change—are natural or shaped by human influence, as their open tree canopies and grass understory challenge conventional definitions of “forest.” Thus understanding past human-fire-vegetation-climate interactions is crucial for addressing these questions and informing conservation and management strategies, particularly in the face of increasing climate variability and fire activity.
In this study, I investigated these relationships using a 150 cm sediment profile from the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary (MWS), a seasonally dry tropical forest in the mid-elevation regions of the Western Ghats. This fire-prone region has a long history of human interaction with the landscape. The analysis of the sediment profile, spanning approximately 1,200 years, reveals a gradual shift from a tree-dominated landscape to a grass-dominated one. The findings also indicate that the site has become drier over time, accompanied by an increase in fire activity in recent centuries. This shift in vegetation and fire patterns suggests human modification of the ecosystem. Additionally, I will discuss the development of a charcoal reference dataset from the region, which will improve fire history reconstructions and enhance the identification of burned vegetation types. The findings provide crucial insights into past fire dynamics and have important implications for future conservation and fire management efforts.
About the speaker: Nithin Kumar is a Project Associate at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, and a PhD researcher at the University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology, Bangalore. His research focuses on paleoecology of the late Holocene, using proxies such as charcoal, n-alkanes, pollen, phytoliths, and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) to reconstruct natural vegetation, climate, and anthropogenic land-use changes.