Unveiling Tree Secrets: Dendrochronology Discoveries

1. Lecture 1:Introduction Dr. James H. Speer

2. Dendrochronology • Dendro - from the Greek word Dendron meaning tree. • Chronology – The science that deals with time and the assignment of dates to particular events.

3. Leonardo da Vinci “Rings in the branches of sawed trees show the number of years and, according to their thickness, the years which were more or less dry. Thus, they reflect the individual worlds to which they belong, in the north they are much thicker than in the south*” (*referring most likely to northern and southern Italy.) Quote from Elio Corona 1986 in Schweingruber 1996). From Leonardo da Vinci’s writing about tree growth in pines in Tuscany, Italy.

4. Alexander Catlin Twining (1801-1884) “In the year 1827, a large lot of hemlock timber was cut from the north eastern slope of East Rock, near New Haven, for the purpose of forming a foundation for the wharf which bounds the basin of the Farmington Canal on the East. While inspecting and measuring that timber, at the time of its delivery, I took particular notice of the successive layers, each of which constitutes a year’s growth of the tree; and which, in that kind of wood, are very distinct. These layers were of various breadth, indicating a growth five or six times as full in some years as in others, preceding or following. Thus every tree had preserved a record of the seasons, for the whole period of its growth, whether thirty years or two hundred, -and what is worthy of observation, every tree told the same story. Thus, if you began at the outer layer of the two trees, one young and the other old, and counted back twenty years, if the young tree indicated, by a full layer, a growing season for that kind of timber, the other tree indicated the same” (Twining 1833). http://www.rootsweb.com/~ctnhvbio/Twining_Alexander.html

5. Charles Babbage (1791-1871) “These preeminent effects are obvious to our senses; but every shower that falls, every change of temperature that occurs, and every wind that blows, leaves on the vegetable world the traces of its passage; slight, indeed, and imperceptible, perhaps, to us, but not the less permanently recorded in the depths of those woody fabrics” (Babbage 1838, 258). “Some [trees] might have been protected by adjacent large trees, sufficiently near to shelter them from the ruder gales, but not close enough to obstruct the light and air by which they were nourished. Such a tree might have a series of large and rather uniform rings; during the period of its protections by its neighbour; and these might be followed by the destruction of its protector” (Babbage 1838, 260). “But the effect of all these local and peculiar circumstances would disappear, if a sufficient number of sections could be procured from fossil trees, spread over considerable extent of country” (Babbage 1838, 260-261). http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Babbage.html

6. Theodor Hartig Robert Hartig Bruno Huber German Dendrochronologists 1805-1880 Professor of Forestry Sciences at the University of Berlin 1899-1969 Professor of Forest Botany at the Technical University of Dresden 1839-1901 Professor at Forest Academy, Eberswalde Germany

7. Scientists That Have Explored Tree Rings • Theophrastus in Greece 322 B.C. • Leonardo Da Vinci in Italy 1500 • Duhamel and Buffon in 1737 • A.C. Twinning in Connecticut in 1827 • Theodor Hartig in Germany in 1837 • Charles Babbage in England in 1838 • Jacob Kuechler in Texas in 1859 • Robert Hartig in Germany in 1867 • A.E. Douglass in Arizona in 1904 • Bruno Huber in Germany in 1940

8. Douglass Coring

9. Douglass at Steward Douglass at Steward Observatory 1941

10. Douglass in Storeroom Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research Tucson, Arizona 1940

11. Douglass in Office Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research Tucson, Arizona 1941

12. Early Dendrochronologists Fred Scantling, Sid Stallings, A.E. Douglass, Edmund Schulman, James Louis Giddings 1946

13. John C. McGregor

14. Fritz Schweingruber, Dave Stahle, Matt Therrell Argentina 2000 Fritz Schweingruber, Dave Stahle, Matt Therrell Argentina 2000

15. Fritz Schweingruber Trento Italy 1995

16. Henri Grissino-Mayer http://web.utk.edu/~grissino/

18. Subfields of Dendrochronology • Dendroarchaeology: Dating of Archaeological dwellings. • Dendroclimatology: Developing a record of past climate. • Dendrogeomorphology: Dating land movements such as landslides in the past. • Dendrohydrology: Creating a record of past water availability and flooding. • Dendroglaciology: Dating past movements of glaciers. • Dendrovolcanology: Dating the past eruptions of volcanoes. • Dendrochemistry: Using tree rings as a monitor of the chemical makeup of the soil. • Dendroecology: Recording ecological processes such as tree-line movement, insect outbreaks, or movement of invasive tree species. • Dendropyrochronology: Dating the past occurrence of forest fires. • Dendroentochronology: The use of tree rings to reconstruct past population levels of insects. • Dendromastecology: The use of tree rings to reconstruct fruiting events in trees.

19. Climate Change

20. Climate Change Records

21. X-ray Densitometry

22. Individual Tree Species That Can Live to be at Least 1,000 Years Old • Intermountain bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva D.K. Bailey), 4,844 years old • Alerce (Fitzroya cuppressoides (Molina) Johnston), 3,620 years old • Giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum (Lindl.) Buchholz), 3,300 years old • Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata Engelm.), 2,425 years old • Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens (D.Don) Endl.), 2,200 years old • Foxtail pine (Pinus balfouriana Grev. & Balf.), 2,110 years old • Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum Sarg.), 1,889 years old • Limber pine (Pinus flexilis James), 1,670 years old • Alaska yellow-cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis (D.Don) Spach), 1,636 • Baldcypress (Taxodium distichum Rich.), 1,622 years old • Western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis Hook.), 1,288 years old • Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco), 1,275 years old • Huon pine (Lagarostrobus franklinii C.J. Quinn), 1,089 years old • Northern white-cedar (Thuja occidentalis L.), 1,032 years old

23. International Tree Ring Data Bank (ITRDB) http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/treering.html

24. ITRDB Web site

25. Tree Rings in the Tropics

26. CDD Landscape