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The frequency of large wildfires in western North America is increasing with rising temperatures, raising questions about how shifting fire regimes will impact forest ecosystems. In the US northern Rocky Mountains, the" Big Burn" of 1910 remains the largest fire year on record, affecting> 11,800 km 2 in Idaho and western Montana. The 1910 fires created ecological and cultural legacies which persist more than a century later, and their ecological impacts may serve as an important example for understanding extensive burning throughout the 21 st century. Here we present results from a combination of paleoecological records and contemporary terrestrial samples to investigate the precedence and ecological consequences of the 1910 fires. We developed a network of eight lake-sediment records of fire activity and ecosystem change spanning the past c. 150 years, across a 10 4 km 2 study area in the northern …