Paleoecological and Sedimentological Data from: “A Classification for Macroscopic Charcoal Morphologies Found in Holocene Lacustrine Sediments”

1. Gravity coring of the uppermost sediments collected the top 41 cm with an intact water-sediment interface (Glew, Smol and Last 2001). Deeper sediments were cored with a Livingstone piston corer (Wright, Mann and Glaser 1984) that collected 348 cm in ≤100 cm segments. Cores were wrapped in plastic and aluminium foil then shipped to refrigerators at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. DATA PAPER

Keywords: anthracology; biomass burning; charcoal analysis; disturbance; fire; lake sediments; morphology; morphotypes; paleobotany; paleoecology; paleofire; Quaternary; sedimentology; wildfire Funding Statement: This study was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Supplemental Strategic Grant (90343797) to LDD, ZG, and MFJP. CJCM was supplemented by a George A. Jeletzky Memorial award and the Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). This dataset contains sedimentological and paleoenvironmental measurements from a 351.5 cm sediment core that was collected from Pyatts Lake, south-east British Columbia, Canada. Sedimentological data include: radiocarbon dates and age-depth model, magnetic susceptibility, loss-on-ignition values, and particle size distributions. Palaeoecological data include: macroscopic charcoal (>150 µm), charcoal morphotypes; aquatic macroremains; pollen spectra, conifer stomata, microscopic charcoal and total fungal spores. These data were used to investigate the potential for charcoal morphotype assemblages for paleoenvironmental interpretations in montane mixed conifer forests. These data were collected from analytical laboratory and optical microscopy analyses. Data are presented in a multiple tabbed spreadsheet. These data can be used for direct comparison with other sedimentological, vegetation, and disturbance histories during the Holocene and may be compared to prior geologic time periods in an analogue context. The charcoal data can be applied to syntheses of biomass burning from local to global scales and pollen data can be combined into pollen database analyses.

Charcoal morphotypes (Courtney Mustaphi and
Pisaric 2014) were counted under a stereomicroscope from contiguous subsamples of 1-2 cm 3 , deflocculated in a sodium hexametaphosphate solution, wet sieved through 150 µm mesh. No bleaching with hydrogen peroxide (Schlachter and Horn 2010) was performed on these samples as the organic detritus was readily distinguishable.

Sampling strategy
Centre of lake targeted for coring. Magnetic susceptibility and macroscopic charcoal analysis were performed at contiguous high-resolution intervals. Other sedimentological and paleoecological measurements were performed at lower (decimetre) resolution down core. Subsampling volumes, procedures and treatments are presented in detail in the study (Courtney Mustaphi and Pisaric 2014).

Quality Control
Particle size distributions were run in triplicate then averaged and a laboratory standard was run at the start of each day of use to track any machine drift.

Constraints
Few attempts at replication were conducted so data have no associated error bars.
'Pyatts Lake.kmz' contains geospatial location of the site for use in GIS or Google Earth software.

Data type
Primary data.

Language
English.

Repository location
Open Quaternary Harvard Dataverse http://dx.doi. org/10.7910/DVN/ZNJTS (Mustaphi, 2015) Total macroscopic charcoal data from the Pyatts Lake sediment core has also been submitted to the Global Charcoal Database version 4 (PAGES Global Paleofire Working Group). http://www.gpwg.org/ OPEN ACCESS (4) Reuse potential Comparison with new local or distant records would be useful for examining spatiotemporal trends in polleninferred vegetation cover and biomass burning trends (Blarquez, et al 2014). These morphological results may be subjected to further multivariate analyses alongside additional high resolution proxy data from this site to understand the relationships between vegetation cover, fire, climate and taphonomy with charcoal products. Land cover and land use change analyses using remote sensing products, such as air and satellite imagery, coupled with these high resolution lake sediment data (Aleman, et al 2013) would provide insight on recent changes during twentieth century land development and fire suppression.