Forest disturbances and tree growth are major drivers of dynamics and long-term carbon storage in forests. Combining forest inventory data and tree-ring analysis allows for a retrospective estimate of aboveground forest biomass (AGB) and disturbance dynamics at decadal to centennial scales, both being directly related to net primary productivity (NPP). We used this combined approach to estimate precisely-dated ages of aboveground carbon in over 20 temperate old-growth forests in Western Eu...

Free, in person and onlineWe will hold a practical, skills-based workshop introducing openDendro -- an open-source framework of the base analytic software tools used in dendrochronology in both the R and Python programming languages. openDendro is a new unified set of tree-ring analysis tools in open-source environments that provides the necessary baseline for dendro...

Evidence of volcanic cooling and its human impacts has been described for various regions of the globe over the past several centuries to millennia, derived from paleoclimatic and historical data. Due to its remote location, detailed accounts of such impacts over Northwestern North America (NWNA) are still quite limited. Here we use a newly expanded tree-ring density network (derived from blue intensity as well as maximum latewood density parameters) to assess the climatic and human impact...

Tree-ring research has given generations of scientists a long memory of what is acceptable for a tree to be included for data analysis. The established criteria, however, were set through purposeful goals to maximize the response for climatic reconstructions. Ecology is different. Tree-rings are increasingly being used to study a wide swath of ecology, including the carbon cycle or the response of ecosystems to global changes. A fundamental aspect of ecology is to understand the range of r...

Information garnered from historical timbers and wooden artifacts (e.g. houses, barns, ships) can greatly enhance our understanding of human, ecological, and climate history, especially in regions where few old-growth forests and trees remain, tree longevity is relatively short (less than 300-400 years), and environmental conditions break down wood rather quickly, like in mesic to wet regions Over the last decade plus, the application of tree-ring techniques on woo...

"Drought legacy effects (DLE) in radial tree growth (RTG) have been extensively studied over the last decade and are found to critically influence carbon sequestration in woody biomass. However, the statistical significance of DLE depends on our definition of expected vs. unexpected growth variability, a definition that has not received sufficient scrutiny.Here, we revisit popular DLE analyses using the ITRDB and employ a synthetic data simulation to disentangle four key factors influe...

The boreal forest located in high northern latitudes stores about a third of the world’s carbon and covers almost a quarter of the Earth’s land surface. This region is experiencing one of the fastest temperatures increases on the planet. Yet it is unclear how global warming affects carbon sequestration and storage in this biome. Here, we explore how white spruce (Picea glauca [Moench] Voss) growing in North America responded to climate change during the 20th century using tree-ring width a...