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...

Dendrochronology in eastern New York State, USA, was established from timbers used in European settlement and development of the Hudson and Mohawk River Valleys starting in the mid-17th century.  The abundant primary forests were the source, and timbers were used locally and exported via the rivers.  West of the Hudson River Valley, successful settlement was more precarious from human conflict until the late 18th - early 19th century, and the oldest dated buildings are located al...

We present a 211-year tree-ring-based reconstruction of the annual mean flow of the Sainte Anne River, Gaspésie, Québec, Canada. The river traverses through the interior of the Gaspé Peninsula where the instrumental hydrological and climatic records are particularly short. This is the first streamflow/soil moisture reconstruction between the Hudson River and north-central Québec, filling a substantial geographical gap along the eastern North American margin, and adding to the only three ex...

Few spring paleoclimate records are available for boreal Canada and given the warming of spring temperatures in recent decades and its impact on snowmelt and hydrological processes, the search for spring climate proxies is receiving increasing attention. Tree-ring anatomical features and intra-annual widths were used to reconstruct regional mean March-April-May temperature from 1770 to 2016 in eastern boreal Canada. Nested principal component regressions calibrated on 116 years of gridded ...

Climate extremes are driven by a combination of thermodynamical and dynamical factors. In Europe, the primary dynamical driver of summer climate extremes is the position of the jet stream over the Europe-North Atlantic (EU) region. To study long-term variability in the position of the EU jet, as well as its potential impact on past climate extremes and human systems, we have reconstructed EU jet variability over the past 800+ years (1200-2005 CE). To accomplish this, we have combined five ...

Annually resolved subfossil kauri (Agathis australis) trees, recovered from bogs in northern New Zealand, provide unique insights into past climate events over multi-millennial timescales. Their tree-rings faithfully capture annually resolved information about climate and carbon dynamics occurring during their lifespan. Preserved material has contributed tree-ring chronologies spanning much of the Holocene and extending into the late Pleistocene (i.e. the last 50,000 years). A recently dis...

The Laacher See Eruption (LSE) ranks among Europe’s largest Upper Pleistocene volcanic events. Although its tephra deposits represent an important isochron for the synchronization of proxy archives at the Late Glacial to early Holocene transition, uncertainty in the eruption age has prevailed. Combined analysis of high-precision ring width and radiocarbon measurements from individual rings of trees that were killed during volcanic eruptions and buried by their deposits can provide eruption...

Dendrochronology is considered one the most precise of all the scientific dating techniques. However, it requires long sequences of tree rings and a master record for both the species and region in question. At the University of Groningen, we have been pioneering a new approach to dating that combines the precision of dendrochronology with the versatility of radiocarbon dating. It relies on the detection of spikes in the annual radiocarbon record, thought to b...

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 wo...