Global Charcoal Database

The aim of the Global Charcoal Database (GCD) is to provide the scientific community with a global paleofire dataset for research and archiving sedimentary records of fire. The GCD is managed by the Global Paleofire Working Group – GPWG.

The GCD is funded and support by: the PAGES initiative and the project OREAS by Région Franche-Comté in France via the Chrono-environnement laboratory.

The science emerging from the GPWG is mainly:

- the creation of a public-access database and an international research community with multiple-authored papers describing observed spatiotemporal changes in fire at global and regional scales (e.g. time series and maps).

- Global and regional syntheses which enable the examination of broad-scale patterns in paleofire activity, creating a framework for exploring the linkages among fire, Human, climate and vegetation at centennial-to-multi-millennial time scales and allowing for evaluation of fire model simulations at regional to global scales.