Blue Intensity (BI) is a cost-effective analytical method for measuring relative wood density in the rings of conifer tree species. Since early concept papers in the 1990s/2000s, there has been a recent explosion in the application of this method for both dendroclimatology and historical dating as well as other dendro-disciplines. The beauty of BI is that the analytical costs, mainly related to the cost of a high-quality scanner, are extremely cheap compared to traditional densitometric methods while training is also relatively simple. This means that compared to traditional ring density approaches, higher volumes of data can be produced. There are however limitations of the method with respect to wood colouration issues (i.e. heartwood/sapwood colour changes, fungal discolouration etc) and scanner resolution that can impact the quality of the derived data. In this workshop, through presentations and hands-on measurement and basic analysis, we will introduce the BI method and its application in dendrochronology and communicate both the strengths and limitations of the data produced by current laboratory methods. We will finish by introducing a range of possible solutions to these limitations. 

Recommendations provided by the organizer:

• Is the participant invited to follow interactively? In person workshop, presentations streamed online
• Does the participant need a laptop? Yes – running windows OS (with .NET installed).
• Will the participant require internet connection during the workshop? Not necessarily 
• Additional remarks from the organizer: Please also download the files for the workshop which are in a zipped file called “BI workshop files.zip”https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sGIG7sC5etj97Q0u14k3jMkpx4Fwmg_c/view?usp=sharing
• within this zipped file are a further 4 zipped folders

These include the limited version of CooRecorder and CDendro that we’ll use for the workshop. This only installs on Windows!

The POS files for select JPG images

All JPG images of the Big White site samples used for the 2014 paper – Wilson et al. (2014) – PDF attached.

And finally the Tucson files for RW, raw LWB, inverted LWB and MXD data for the Big White site

Please remember that this is a workshop on how to generate BI from Coorecorder measurements and use such measurements. It is not focussed on teaching you CooRecorder and CDendro. In the attached schedule we make reference to Stockton Maxwell’s tutorial videos on the use of the software for TR measurement and crossdating.

Please download these files before the workshop and ensure you have installed the CD-CR software on your computers for the workshop.