Tree-Ring Talk

Climate change, forests, and nature's space-time continuum revealed with tree rings

UA Museum Day Keynote address at the LTRR

Climate change, wildfire, and landscape homogenization in Western Canada

Wildfire is the most important disturbance agent in forests of Western Canada, affecting stand structure and composition, biodiversity, biogeochemical cycling, hydrologic processes, and natural resource extraction.  Despite considerable research, consensus on the frequency and severity of historical fire occurrence has been elusive in much of the Canadian Cordillera.  Some of this uncertainty derives from epistemological differences between influential researchers in the discipline, but much derives from methodological limitations.  One area of parti

Diné forests: unraveling early warning signs in tree rings

Diné forests face escalating challenges from changing climate, impacting forest health and resilience. Tree rings collected within a forestry inventory are enhancing our understanding of forest dynamics on the Navajo Nation. In this presentation, we share the results of this study, conducted in partnership with the Navajo Forestry Department (NFD), combining dendrochronological analyses and forest inventory by employing a stratified random subsample of NFD’s Continuous Forest Inventory to assess the responses of Diné forests to climate variability.

Signs of climatic variation in the width and density of P. hartwegii tree-rings at the ends of its elevational gradient in the mountains of central Mexico

Trees in alpine forests, being sessile and long-lived organisms, are exposed to intra- and inter-annual climatic variation, which is recorded in their growth rings. Specifically, trees growing at the ends of their natural distribution are the most affected due to in those sites the conditions are marginal and adverse for their development and growth. The objective was to evaluate how interannual climatic variation affects the width (RW) and density (RD) of tree-ring formation of P.

Eastern North Pacific tropical cyclone influences on southwestern North America

The eastern North Pacific (ENP) basin boasts a high density of tropical cyclone (TC) formation compared with other ocean basins in which TCs occur. Since ENP TCs can form near or otherwise impact land, they serve as an important yet variable source of summer and fall precipitation in southwestern North America. Higher sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and reduced vertical wind shear associated with El Niño events tend to support increased TC activity, exemplified by the very active 2015 ENP hurricane season.

Dendro Down Under: Expanding Tree-Ring Research in Australia

In this seminar Heather will discuss her adventures in undertaking dendrochronology in Australia with a focus on three area of dendrochronological studies.

Studying solar variability with radiocarbon in tree rings

The Sun provides virtually all the principal energy input to the Earth’s climate system and solar variability is a significant external climate forcing. For instance, the sun irregularly expels large amounts of energetic particles into the interplanetary space and towards Earth which can be observed as so-called solar proton events (SPE), which can potentially cause major damages to satellites and can even disrupt sensitive electronic systems at ground level.

A refined understanding of historical fire regimes in temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest

Temperate rainforests in the Pacific Northwest are renowned for their tremendous biomass, structural complexity, and because many conifer species reach their greatest size and age in the region. Temperate rainforests have a reputation as mossy and damp forests where fires are infrequent and predominantly high severity.

Open science improvements in dendrochronology and data processing pipelines for quantitative wood anatomy

The presentation explores current practices that exemplify open science in dendrochronology, illustrating the communal progression towards transparent, accessible research. A key focus is the introduction of innovative tools specifically designed for quantitative wood anatomy (QWA) and how to integrate QWA data into existing dendrochronology data infrastructure. These tools are part of a refined data processing pipeline, tailored to manage the varied data produced for QWA studies.

Ecology-centered tree-ring research at ForestGEO

Reliable projections of future carbon (C) dynamics are essential to resource management decision making under a changing climate. A hybrid-biometric modelling approach that combines tree-ring based stand reconstruction and the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector (CBM-CFS3) to estimate past magnitude and inter-annual variation of ecosystem carbon stocks and fluxes including net primary production (NPP), net ecosystem production (NEP), and heterotrophic respiration (Rh) can be used to generate additional corroborative data that may reduce uncertainty in C flux estimates.

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