Tree-Ring Talk

Showing the impact of scientific databases and collections

Many scientific and scholarly disciplines depend on the use of collections: collections of specimens housed in natural history museums, core repositories, or tree ring labs; or collections of data stored on servers or spreadsheets. Yet, these valuable and irreplaceable infrastructures often fade from public view — and consequently, from budget lines and funding priorities.

Tree-rings reveal the legacy of Indigenous cultural burning in the Southwest USA

Studying the influence of Indigenous people on ancient and historical fire regimes has been methodologically challenging. In the Southwest United States, well-replicated fire histories suggest that abundant lightning and suitable climate conditions drove frequent low-severity wildfires in dry pine forests independent of human activities even as ethnography provided hints that highly mobile indigenous populations used fire in myriad land use contexts.

Prometheus found: preserving the ephemeral through glass art

Floods and droughts : Stable isotope compositions of plants to improve climate reconstruction in the semi-arid environment of Northern Botswana and the Zambezi region of Namibia

Northern Botswana and Namibia present semi-arid environment, where evaporation exceeds precipitation, interlaced by major river systems including the Zambezi, Kwando, and Okavango rivers. Water availability is the principal constraint on human livelihoods, ecosystems, and economic activities, with these rivers serving as critical resources for agriculture, domestic supply, fisheries, and tourism. Recent shifts in precipitation regimes are altering regional hydrological systems and affecting both ecosystems and water-dependent communities.

Tree Ring Talk

Space-for-time substitution: a widespread and dangerous practice in predictive ecology

Tree Ring Talk

Seeing the light and feeling the heat? Reconstructing canopy disturbance and climate from ring widths

Canopy disturbance events in forests (or ‘release events’) often increase light availability and growth rates for surviving trees. Using ring widths, release-detection methods identify the onset of rapid growth associated with these events enabling reconstructions of forest disturbance history. Conversely, dendroclimate reconstructions minimize these rapid growth responses by detrending entire ring-width time series to resolve underlying climate signals.

Building a multi-proxy fire history for southwest Australia

Insights into Alaska's boreal forests from Forest Inventory and Analysis tree-rings—what are the limitations?

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