Yanming Ruan

Linkages between continental hydrology, vegetation and biomass burning in Indonesia since the Last Glacial

Indonesia lies at the heart of the Indo-Pacific warm pool (IPWP), the largest and most important area of deep atmospheric convection on Earth. Today, the seasonally reversing Australian-Indonesian monsoon and the latitudinal migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) control the rainfall seasonality in different parts of Indonesia. The states of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean also exert substantial impacts on the climate of Indonesia through inter-annual and decadal coupled atmosphere-ocean oscillations such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) as well as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). Despite the overall high rainfall amount in the IPWP, fire is a severe problem in Indonesia and can act as important feedback agent.

I propose to use compound-specific leaf wax δD and δ¹³C analyses to reconstruct the continental hydrology and vegetation evolution in western and central Indonesia since the last glacial. With these analyses I aim to understand how hydro-climate in these regions responded to remote and local forcings. I also propose to apply molecular markers of combustion to the sediment archives to reconstruct the fire history in Indonesia since the last glacial. By doing this I intend to unravel the occurrence of fire in different regions of Indonesia during various time intervals, and to evaluate the role of biomass burning for the hydro-climatic and vegetation evolution.