Great question! I think a recent study that I completed with colleagues in the Red Hills Region of Florida and Georgia was especially fascinating. Most tree-ring based fire history studies show almost no fire activity in the 1900s and later. This is because of the “Smokey Bear Effect” - people stopped allowing fires to burn in the U.S. through direct fire suppression. There were also changes in fuels related to development (e.g., roads that disrupted fire spread) and cattle and sheep grazing that inhibited fire occurrence and spread in much of the U.S. What was interesting about the Red Hills study is that we found TONS of fire activity through the 1900s and up to the present day. The Red Hills have long been known as a region where the burning never stopped, but we provided hard evidence of this claim through the fire scars.

Here’s a link to that publication:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112720311750