Phil Higuera recently attended a meeting of the Global Paleofire Working Group (GPWG) in Frasne, France, where he presented a summary of his lab’s work focused on understanding the causes and consequences of fire-regime change across multiple temporal scales (PDF). The goal of the GPWG is to provide the scientific community with a global charcoal dataset to facilitate research on fire in the Earth system. The meeting in France was focused on “test-driving” a toolkit being developed in the R statistical language to synthesize multiple records from the global charcoal database, and work towards the release of Version 4 of the database. This work was supported by the Past Global Changes program (PAGES) and NSF funding from the WildFIRE PIRE and PalEON projects.