Aim Increasing aridity has driven widespread synchronous fire occurrence in recent decades across North America. The lack of historical (pre‐1880) fire records limits our ability to understand long‐term continental fire‐climate dynamics. The goal of this study is to use tree‐ring reconstructions to determine the relationships between spatiotemporal patterns in historical climate and widespread fire occurrence in North American...

Tree rings provide an invaluable long‐term record for understanding how climate and other drivers shape tree growth and forest productivity. However, conventional tree‐ring analysis methods were not designed to simultaneously test effects of climate, tree size, and other drivers on individual growth. This has limited the potential to test ecologically relevant hypotheses on tree growth sensitivity to environmental drivers and...

Reconstructions of dry western US forests in the late 19th century in A rizona, C olorado and O regon based on G eneral L and O ffice records were used by W illiams & B aker (2012; G lobal E cology and B iogeography , 21 , 1042–1052; hereafter W & B ) to infer past fire regimes with substantial moderate and high‐severity burning. The authors concluded that present‐day large, high‐severity fires are not distinguishable from his...