New approaches are needed to resolve persistent geographic gaps and biases in paleofire research. Most sedimentary paleofire research relies on lake and peat sediments. We present an unconventional sedimentary charcoal record preserved in a modern, post-bomb bat guano deposit and compare its accumulation to historical fire data. We find strong correlations between charcoal accumulation rates (CHAR) and non-winter prescribed burns. CHAR in bat guano is more strongly correlated with prescribed fire than wildfire or total area burned, likely due to bats seeking out areas burned by prescribed fire for better foraging opportunities and/or bats avoiding wildfire. We attribute the CHAR in guano being a better recorder of area burned during non-winter months to winter bat hibernation. Our analyses show that charcoal preserved in bat guano is a reliable paleofire proxy system, which has important implications for the paleofire field and encourages future research using bat guano as a viable archive.

中文翻译：

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粪便中的火灾：蝙蝠可靠地记录了它们的鸟粪中的火灾历史


需要新的方法来解决古火研究中持续存在的地理差距和偏见。大多数沉积古火研究依赖于湖泊和泥炭沉积物。我们提出了保存在现代爆炸后蝙蝠鸟粪沉积物中的非常规沉积木炭记录，并将其积累与历史火灾数据进行了比较。我们发现木炭积累率 （CHAR） 和非冬季计划烧伤之间有很强的相关性。蝙蝠粪便中的 CHAR 与计划用火的相关性比野火或燃烧的总面积更强，这可能是由于蝙蝠寻找被计划烧毁的区域以获得更好的觅食机会和/或蝙蝠避开野火。我们将鸟粪中的 CHAR 归因于冬季蝙蝠冬眠，可以更好地记录非冬季蝙蝠的燃烧面积。我们的分析表明，保存在蝙蝠粪便中的木炭是一种可靠的 paleofire 代理系统，这对 paleofire 领域具有重要意义，并鼓励未来使用蝙蝠粪便作为可行的档案进行研究。