Tree-Ring Talk

Interpreting tree ring records using a plant ecophysiological approach

Trees rings record a wealth of information on climate, disturbance, and forest dynamics, and can record these processes from the plot to regional to global scales. However, extracting plant physiological processes from the tree ring record has proved to be more difficult, as integration of leaf to whole tree processes can often lead to confounding results. My research aims to bring a plant ecophysiological perspective to interpreting the tree ring record and to ask, what processes are the rings actually recording?

Using tree rings to anticipate and manage the effects of climate change on forests

Tree-ring Talk by Candidate for Ltrr Faculty Position

Tree-ring data can help resolve the scientific uncertainty surrounding the future behavior of forests and their contribution to the earth's carbon cycle. I describe work in my lab

Forests, fisheries, and five centuries of North Pacific ecosystem variability

Along North America's West Coast, winter sea level pressure is a top-down driver of coastal upwelling, precipitation, and river discharge. Remarkable coherence among these geophysical parameters induces covariance of biological productivity across marine and terrestrial ecosystems, as evidenced by growth-increment chronologies of fish, clams, and trees. Robust paleoenvironmental records indicate that these biologically-relevant winter climate patterns are dominated by low-frequency, 40-60 year periodicities at higher latitudes.

Living on the water: wood and prehistoric pile-dwellings

The image of stilt houses built along lake shores, thus avoiding the floods, is one of the most striking from central European archeology. It comes from the preservation of most of the bearing structures in wood, creating the so-called “field of posts”, due to the wet and anoxic environment where they were buried for millennia.

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