This volume brings together research conducted in western North and South America, areas of a great deal of collaborative work on the influence of people and climate change on fire regimes. It gives a synthetic overview of methods, data and simulation models for evaluating fire regime processes in forests, shrublands and woodlands and assembles case studies of fire, climate and land use histories. The unique approach of this book gives researchers the benefits of a north-south comparison as well as the integration of paleoecological histories, current ecosystem dynamics and modeling of future changes.