RingdateR: A statistical and graphical tool for crossdating

Category: Time:
Wednesday, February 10, 2021 - 12:00 to 13:00
Access:
public
Room: URL: Speaker:
David Reynolds
Affiliation:
Centre for Geography and Environmental Science, College of Life and Environmental Science, University of Exeter
Contact:
Ramzi Touchan and Ann Lynch
Calendar Status:
confirmed

Crossdating is the defining technique of dendrochronology, ensuring that all measurements in a dataset are annually resolved and absolutely dated. This level of accuracy allows for the development of high-resolution environmental reconstructions of climate, disturbance, and productivity not only in trees, but also in other ring-forming organisms including fish, corals, and bivalves. However, crossdating is a laborious process and can be a significant bottleneck in the development of new chronologies, especially when attempting to find matches among undated, dead-collected material. To address this issue we present RingdateR (https://ringdater.github.io/ringdater/), a new stand-alone and web-based application for statistical and graphical crossdating that shares many key features with established crossdating applications, but has been optimised for crossdating large collections of dead-collected material. In this presentation I will provide an overview of the RingdateR application, providing insights into key modes of operation and demonstrating the use of the program to crossdate multiple samples, identify errors in the measurements and ultimately develop a dataset or robustly crossdated samples with the data correctly aligned in time.