September 2016

Due to a reservation for the Exhibit Hall space at the same time, the Tree-Ring Talk has been moved to Bannister 424.

We present reconstructions of the climate of the last millennium using grape harvest dates, stable isotope composition in human teeth enamel and in tree-rings. We specifically discuss the various proxies (model, database, and transfer function) and their application for reconstructing climate and environmental variables including temperature, drought and isotopic composition of precipitation. We focus on the climate variability of Europe during the Little Ice Age. We also show an application to the reconstruction of human mobility in Northern Europe.

Ashes to Ashes is a series of drawings depicting recent Arizona wildfires, rendered with charcoal samples personally collected from each fire site. Each drawing is displayed with its corresponding charcoal sample. The collection represents fourteen significant wildfires from 1990 to the present, with archived photographs used as references.

In light of current and projected increases in global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations throughout the 21st century, it is crucial to understand the long-term effects of environmental changes and climatic variability on the terrestrial carbon cycle. To complement traditional methods of quantifying carbon cycle dynamics such as forest inventories, eddy-covariance measurements and remote sensing, we established a biomass-oriented tree-ring network along a large climate gradient across Europe.