GEOG5839.18, Dendrogeomorphology

This document discusses tree ring dendroclimatology and how tree ring records can be used to understand past climates. Tree ring growth is influenced by climate factors like temperature and precipitation. Multiple tree ring records from a region can be combined and correlated with observed climate data to develop climate reconstructions spanning centuries. However, tree ring growth can be affected by non-climatic factors as well, and some recent studies have found a divergence or weakening correlation between tree growth and temperatures in some northern sites. Overall, tree ring records are a valuable but imperfect proxy for understanding past climate variability over centuries to millennia when used carefully.

Guarding against false discovery in large-scale dendroclimatology

Measurements of tree-ring widths are the most widely-distributed and best replicated source of surrogate environmental information on the planet, and are one of the main archives used to estimate changes in regional and global climate during the past several centuries or millennia. Because the Northern Hemisphere ring-width network is now so large, it is more crucial than ever to ensure our understanding of tree-environment relations is not influenced by decisions to include or exclude certain records. It may be the case that a particular set of ring-width records are, for whatever reason, more tightly coupled to a particular climate factor than other records from the same region or species and, as a result, may be superior estimators of that factor’s past behavior. At the same time, it is known that selecting a small number of predictors from a large pool of potential candidates increases the likelihood of a Type I error. That effect may be particularly relevant to dendroclimatology because the total number of available ring-width records is often much larger than the number of records used to produce reconstructions of large-scale climate features. As an initial step, it would be helpful if paleoclimate reconstructions derived from tree rings described more explicitly the criteria used to select ring-width records as potential predictors and specified those records excluded by that screening. By comparing ring-width chronologies and their relations with climate against the standard set by thousands of records across the hemisphere, we should be better able to distinguish climate signals from proxy noise and produce more accurate reconstructions of climate during the late Holocene.

The "Year Without A Summer" was not a year without a ring

Seeing the Forest for the Tree(Ring)s

1. Tree ring records from across the Northern Hemisphere provide a powerful tool to study past climate, though the information that can be recovered varies regionally depending on climate influences on individual tree species. 2. The large global tree ring network allows understanding of tree-climate relationships without being influenced by decisions to include or exclude certain records, improving the accuracy of paleoclimate reconstructions. 3. Tree ring records have been used to generate reconstructions of large-scale climate drivers like the El Nino-Southern Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation, though conclusions depend on the choice of reconstruction method and data.

GEOG5839.06, The principle of cross dating

The document discusses the principle of cross-dating tree rings. [1] Cross-dating involves matching patterns in tree ring widths or characteristics among multiple trees to identify the exact year each ring was formed. [2] This allows scientists to synchronize the tree ring chronologies and date wood samples far into the past without relying solely on ring counting. [3] Cross-dating is essential for dendrochronology because of various complications that can occur with tree ring formation.

Absent rings are rare in Northern Hemisphere forests outside the American Sou...

Background/Question/Methods Under environmental stress, boreal and temperate trees will occasionally form a discontinuous layer of wood about their stem, a condition described as a locally-absent (or “missing”) growth ring. Absent rings can potentially cause errors in tree-ring dates and dendroclimatic reconstructions but the frequency, distribution and controls of these features are not well understood at large spatial scales. Furthermore, the recent claim that the Northern Hemisphere tree-ring network contains multiple chronological errors caused by widespread but unrecognized locally-absent rings has been difficult to evaluate because it is not known where or when absent rings have occurred across boreal and temperate forests or what environmental factors cause the development of spatially-extensive absent rings. Here we present a synthesis of locally-absent rings across the Northern Hemisphere during the last millennium based on 2,359 publicly-available tree ring-width records. Results/Conclusions Over the entire dataset, one locally-absent ring was observed for every 240 visible rings. More than half of all records (1,296 of 2,359) did not contain a single absent ring. Absent rings were extremely uncommon at high latitudes; poleward of 50°N, the absent:visible ratio increased from 1:240 to 1:2,500. Absent rings were not widespread during the growing seasons that followed the four largest stratospheric sulfate aerosol injection events of the last millennium, including A.D. 1259 and the “Year Without a Summer” in A.D. 1816 or during the coldest year in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 1,500 years. Because these features have occurred so rarely in high-latitude and high-elevation tree ring-width records, the argument that paleotemperature estimates based on these data contain chronological errors due to unrecognized absent rings is not consistent with field observations. If however the rate of absent-ring formation were to increase in forests outside of the American Southwest, that behavior would represent a response to environmental stress that is without precedent over the last millennium.

Building tree-ring chronologies and Program ARSTAN

The document discusses dendroclimatology and paleoclimatology, including how tree rings can be used as climate proxies to reconstruct past climate variations. It explains how tree-ring measurements are standardized and aggregated to extract climate signals and maximize the environmental information while minimizing noise. Methods like COFECHA, detrending, and ARSTAN are used to process tree-ring data and develop high-quality tree-ring chronologies suitable for climate reconstruction.

Large-scale low-frequency variability has emerged as a priority for climate research, but instrumental observations are not long enough to characterize this behavior or gage its impacts on dependent geophysical or ecological systems. As the leading source of high-resolution paleoclimate information in the middle- and high-latitudes, tree rings are essential to understand low-frequency variability prior to the instrumental period. But even though tree rings possess several advantages as climate proxies, like other natural archives they also have their own particular impediments. In this lecture, Dr. St. George will describe the structure and characteristics of the Northern Hemisphere tree-ring width network, and outline how the fingerprint of decadal and multidecadal climate variability encoded within ancient trees varies across the hemisphere.

GEOG5839.13, Sampling strategies

This document discusses several principles of dendrochronology: - The principle of ecological amplitude describes the range of habitats a tree species can grow in, and trees at the limits may be more sensitive to environmental changes. - The principle of site selection states that dendrochronologists should consider limiting factors and ecological amplitude to identify trees most likely to provide information about a specific environmental signal. - The principles of cross-dating, aggregate tree growth, and replication are important for dendrochronology research to build robust tree-ring chronologies.

IonE Frontiers, Through The Trees

Many of the decisions we make about environmental issues are based on experience. Whether we're setting limits for the use of scarce resources, estimating the risks posed by natural hazards, or deciding how to manage protected areas, our plans for the future often reflect our understanding of the past. The problem is that, when it comes to the environment, our society has a fairly short memory. In this presentation, Dr. St. George will discuss how the study of ancient trees is expanding our perspective on the natural history of the northern Plains and helping to answer questions about what the future may hold for Minnesota's environment.

GEOG5839.01. Introduction to Dendrochronology

Class 1, introduction to dendrochronology

The annual growth rings from trees provide us with an incredibly powerful and adaptable tool to study Earth’s history. The rings tell us much more than just the age of tree. They also provide clues that help us understand how our environment has changed in the past, and provide insights into how key processes in atmosphere, biosphere and geological systems operate over long timescales. This course will teach students the fundamental principles of dendrochronology through a combination of formal lectures, class discussion and laboratory exercises. Students will work in the University of Minnesota’s Center for Dendrochronology, where they will learn how to collect, prepare and date tree-ring specimens. By the end of the course, they will be able to explain both the key concepts underlying dendrochronology and discuss how evidence from tree rings is used to address contemporary issues in natural history, resource management and Earth Systems Science.

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A good talk can open the doors to new collaborations, increase your chances of funding success, and make it more likely other people will respond to your ideas. But scientific presentations are too often confusing, boring, and overstuffed. Here are some suggestions, based on our experience as speakers, audience members, and presentation trainers, that we hope will make your next conference talk or seminar more enjoyable, engaging and effective.

What archeologists need to know about dendrochronology in Minnesota

This document provides an overview of dendrochronology, which is the scientific method of dating tree rings to the exact year of formation. It discusses key researchers in the field like Andrew Douglass and Edward Cook. Dendrochronology allows researchers to reconstruct past climate conditions like drought. It has applications for dating wood artifacts and understanding natural hazards. The document outlines current research projects using dendrochronology to study topics like changes in lake hydrology, climate impacts on forests, and flood frequency.

Don’t call it a comeback: Studying ancient floods to prepare for future hazards

How long do we need to watch a river before its behavior holds no more surprises? In this country, instrumental measurements of river stage and discharge stretch back a century or more, but this observed history still provides only a rough guide to the risks of future extreme floods. In this lecture, I’ll outline how paleoflood hydrology expands our perspective on river history by combining historical, botanical, and geological evidence of earlier (and ofttimes unknown) floods. And I’ll explain how we can interpret those physical clues left behind by ancient floods to improve hazard assessments for at-risk communities, support decisions about flood infrastructure, and investigate the long-term effects of climate or land-use changes on flooding. Because what has happened before can happen again, most everyone near a river would profit by keeping a longer memory of old floods.

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Tree rings can be used to determine the age of trees and study environmental conditions in different years. Each year a tree forms a new growth ring, with wider rings indicating better growing conditions and narrower rings indicating drought or other difficulties. By matching ring patterns between trees, scientists have developed tree-ring chronologies that can date back thousands of years. The field of dendrochronology uses these ring patterns to date wood and study past climate patterns, as well as applications in archaeology, geology, and environmental science.

Disentangling the decadal ‘knot’ in high-resolution paleoclimatology

Even after more than a century of coordinated monitoring, instrumental weather observations are still too short to adequately constrain decadal or multidecadal behavior in the Earth’s climate system. Leading climatologists and climate modelers have called for the wider application of high-resolution proxy records to decadal variability and prediction studies, and our community has responded by producing new paleoclimate products that specifically target this type of ‘intermediate-term’ behavior. But we now also know our medium changes that message: the biological and geological systems that encode climate information into natural archives often also alter the original ‘input’, usually due to either seasonal filtering or non-climatic persistence. In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the challenges inherent to the use of high-resolution proxies to study decadal or multi-decadal climate variability, and suggest strategies that might clarify how climate acts on those timescales. And we’ll also present a new theoretical framework that could help paleo-scientists evaluate competing ideas about the causes of decadal- or multi-decadal events known to have occurred during the past one or two millennia.

tree ring analysis ( master chronology , Dendrochronology)

Tree ring analysis involves examining the growth rings of trees. Each year a tree forms a new growth ring, with wider rings indicating better growing conditions and narrower rings indicating drought or other environmental stressors. Scientists can use patterns in tree ring widths to date samples very precisely by year. Dendrochronology, the scientific study of tree ring patterns, helps researchers understand past climates and date archaeological sites by matching ring patterns among trees.

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Mackenzie Nelsen, a junior at Watauga High School, collected tree core samples from high and low elevation areas to analyze how climate change may affect high altitude carbon sequestration. She found that trees at elevations over 3,000 feet showed significantly more growth variation from 1990-2013 compared to low elevation trees. This suggests climate change will have a greater impact on mountain ecosystems. Higher CO2 levels may boost high elevation tree growth through fertilization but also make them more vulnerable to climate extremes.

Ringing true: The scientific and societal relevance of dendrochronology at th...

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This document summarizes an interdisciplinary tree-ring research conference. It discusses the need for new theory in dendroclimatology, presentations on temperature and river flow reconstructions from tree rings, and principles of tree ring research site selection and replication. It also questions how to evaluate rare signals in tree growth and climate relationships and where remote teleconnections may be most evident in tree rings.

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Dendroecology is the use of tree-ring dating and analyses to investigate events and processes involving the interactions of organisms with their environment. It provides a longer temporal perspective than other records through tree-ring evidence that has high precision. Chronological control allows comparison of multiple lines of evidence. However, tree-ring records can be irregular and some processes may be unknown. Past conditions may have no modern analog, complicating interpretation. Dendroecology is used to study forest demography, growth dynamics, and disturbance ecology like insect outbreaks and fire history.

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This document discusses advances in the field of dendrochronology. It describes new modeling approaches that use tree ring data to better understand climate variability over time. These include the Vaganov-Shashkin model that tracks limiting growth factors throughout the growing season. Stable isotope analysis of tree rings is expanding the field into the tropics by allowing the reconstruction of climate variables without visually distinct annual growth rings. Overall, tree ring data combined with new statistical techniques and modeling are improving scientists' ability to study past climate changes and validate climate reconstructions.

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This document discusses contemporary issues in reconstructing ancient climates from proxy data like tree rings. It notes that while tree ring data contains climate information, uncertainties exist in extracting climate signals due to non-climatic tree growth factors and noise in proxy records. Statistical methods are needed to combine multiple proxy records but must account for these issues to avoid overfitting. The document also explores using tree ring data to study decadal scale climate variability and whether proxies may amplify low frequency climate signals.

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Major losses from natural disasters in 2010 were as follows: - Storms: $20.1 billion - Earthquakes: $12.9 billion - Floods: $6.4 billion - Cold/frost: $0.4 billion - Droughts: $0.01 billion Tree ring studies have been used to reconstruct past flood levels on the Red River over the past 350 years, helping to better understand the size and frequency of historical floods. Paleoflood evidence from tree scars provides a longer-term context for current flood risks than instrumental records alone.

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More from Scott St. George

How long do trees remember?

Much of what we know regarding variations in Earth's climate during the past millennium comes from tree rings. But tree rings, like other proxies, attenuate some climate signals but amplify others, and their fidelity at longer timescales is difficult to gage. Even though dendroclimatology is well-established, questions remain about the climate clues encoded in tree rings — particularly at decadal-to-centennial timescales.

Historic accounts of extreme floods on the Red River of the North

A new framework to test the origins of western American megadrought

We know from tree rings and other natural drought records that the western United States has been affected by several 'megadroughts' during the past millennium. But are these exceptionally long-lasting droughts due to unusual external forcings, or are they inevitable given a sufficiently long period of time? Here we present a statistical model that combines sea surface temperature records and drought severity statistics from the western USA, and use that tool to set out an expectation for megadrought, given no other changes in the climate system. Even though this model was trained using only modern climate data (and incorporates no information from tree rings or other proxies), it still produced megadroughts. Moreover, those simulated megadroughts were just as long-lasting, covered as large an area, and were just as severe as real megadroughts estimated from tree rings. That result means that megadroughts can occur in the western United States even if nothing else changes in the climate -- they really are just a matter of time. On the other hand, the only aspect of real-world megadroughts that the model cannot duplicate was the high number of these events during the so-called Medieval Climate Anomaly (800 to 1300 CE). So that cluster of megadroughts may have been caused by some sort of unusual climate circumstances that have not been observed by us during the past few decades. The proxy record tells us that many different kinds of exceptional or unusual climate events happened in the past. But it is often difficult to determine what caused those exceptional events because even, within a period of a thousand years, we still have very few cases. So besides being an aid to understand the causes of past megadroughts, we hope this approach can be applied to other paleoclimate records to distinguish between real interrelations between separate components of the climate system and simple coincidences.

The societal value of historical and paleoflood research in Manitoba, Canada

1) Shared knowledge of past natural disasters has a major impact on preparation for future hazards. The document discusses the historical floods along the Red River in Manitoba, Canada. 2) Winnipeg built a large flood diversion channel in the 1960s after experiencing major floods, including in 1826 and 1950, to protect the city from future flooding of the Red River. 3) American communities like Grand Forks and Fargo were more vulnerable to Red River flooding until recently because they did not have the same long historical memory of floods that informed Winnipeg's early investment in flood protection infrastructure.

Solar ghosts: Weighing the evidence for sunspot cycles in fossil trees

In their study of tree rings from the Chemnitz Fossil Forest (Germany), Luthardt and Rößler (2017) claim to identify a regular near-11-yr cyclicity in growth, and present that pattern as evidence of the influence of the Schwabe solar cycle (Usokin and Mursula, 2003) on climate and forest productivity during the early Permian. If correctly interpreted, these fossil tree rings would indicate the sunspot cycle was the dominant influence on interannual variability in Earth’s climate during this period and that it has been a consistent aspect of our Sun’s behavior for at least the past 300 m.y. We argue the fossil tree-ring record from Chemnitz does not constitute reliable evidence of solar activity during the Permian because the individual tree-ring sequences are not correctly aligned (dendrochronologically dated) and, as a result, the mean ring-width composite is not a meaningful estimate of year-to-year variations in tree growth in this ancient forest.

Long droughts: Using natural climate archives to gage the risks of future “me...

In the Biblical story of Joseph, following seven years of abundance, the Kingdom of Egypt was confronted by seven years of drought and famine. In the parlance of modern climate science, intervals with several consecutive extremely dry years are described as ‘“megadroughts”. In this short talk, I’ll describe how climate scientists combine clues from natural weather archives (including corals, tree rings, lake sediments, and many other sources) to reveal the history of ancient megadroughts across our planet. And I’ll highlight new research that combines these surrogate drought records with simulations from state-of-the-art climate models to help us better anticipate the risks of unusually persistent droughts during the coming century.

Expecting the unexpected: The relevance of old floods to modern hydrology

This document discusses the importance of understanding past floods to properly assess modern flood risks. It provides examples of paleoflood research along rivers like the Red River of the North, which uncovered major floods in 1826 and around 700 years ago that exceeded any floods measured by modern instrumentation. Understanding a river's full history through both recorded data and geological evidence of past floods is essential for floodplain management, development planning, and infrastructure design to mitigate future flood risks.

What to expect when you’re expecting decadal variability in hydroclimatic pro...

Decadal variability in tree rings

Strong variance at decadal and multidecadal timescales is a common feature of most tree-ring width records. But does this aspect of tree growth exhibit such long-memory behavior due to biology, climate, or some combination of the two factors? Understanding the origins of this behavior is crucial for efforts to evaluate the causes of decadal variability in the climate system. Presentation at Johann Gutenburg University (Mainz) on February 16, 2017.

Five Things You Can Do Right Now To Make Your Research Presentations Just A L...

The ability to deliver effective and engaging oral presentations is a critical skill for all researchers. Unfortunately, despite the importance of clear communication, too many scientific presentations at conferences and workshops are confusing, abstract, and boring. In this short workshop, participants learn several key strategies and tips that will make their professional presentations just a little bit better than the rest. We discuss strategies for presentation planning, show how basic design principles can create more memorable slides, and point towards an outstanding set online tools and resources. Become a presentation superstar! Scott St. George is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota and a Resident Fellow at UMN's Institute on the Environment. Prior to joining the faculty at Minnesota, he was a research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada. Scott shares some of his experiences ‘doing presentations differently’ at conferences, outreach opportunities, and the classroom.

Trees as flood sensors

In many settings, trees growing on floodplains provide an important source of indirect evidence that may be used to infer the occurrence, extent, and magnitude of floods prior to direct observations. That evidence may take several forms, including external scars caused by abrasion or impact from floating debris, anatomical changes within the annual growth increment following prolonged stem or root inundation, or tilting or uprooting due to the hydraulic pressure of floodwaters. Likely the most useful characteristic of paleoflood studies based on floodplain trees is their relatively high temporal resolution and dating accuracy compared to most other methods. Dendrochronological methods can routinely date past floods to the year of their occurrence and, in rare cases, can estimate the timing of floods that occur during the growing season to within two weeks. This high degree of chronological control, which is surpassed only by that provided by direct observation or instrumentation, can be used to determine whether floods in separate watersheds were synchronous or offset by several years and test hypotheses that suppose linkages between extreme floods and specific forcing mechanisms. Furthermore, the wide geographic distribution of tree species with dateable rings combined with the broad suite of methods available to examine interconnections between floods and tree growth allow this style of paleoflood hydrology to be applied to many settings that are not suitable for techniques that depend on geological evidence. Future paleoflood research involving tree rings will need to strike a balance between improving our understanding of the biological and fluvial processes that link tree growth to past events, and providing answers to questions about flood dynamics and hazards that are needed to safeguard people and property from future floods.

Expanding the window - the past, present, and future of Minnesota's water

Nearly all decisions about water in Minnesota relate either directly or indirectly to data collected by the state’s hydrological observing network. Because most gauges were installed in early 20th century, as a whole the network provides us with roughly a 100-year ‘window’ to estimate flood risks, develop worst-case scenarios for drought, and set maximum allowable withdrawals for aquifers. But when we rely exclusively on observations made during this relatively brief interval, we may inadvertently increase our exposure to hydrological ‘surprises’. In order to make sound decisions about water in Minnesota, we need to expand this window: into the past, drawing upon historical accounts and natural archives; and into the future, via projections from climate and hydrological models. By cultivating a broader perspective on hydrological variability and extremes across the state, we will be better prepared to ensure adequate water supplies and mitigate the impacts of future floods and droughts.

Making Climate Data Sing

These visuals were prepared to support a string quartet performance and panel on climate change at Northwestern University in February 2106. A well-designed graphic can help audiences to quickly understand the main message embedded within a complex set of climate data and to retain those ideas longer than they would have if they were conveyed by words alone. But the visual aids used regularly by climate scientists also have their limitations: they are most easily understood by people who are already fluent in technical illustrations; they're usually static and sometimes do not tell an obvious story; and for many, they don't elicit a strong emotional response. Music, by contrast, is inherently narrative and is known to exert a powerful influence on human emotions. Because of this, sonification — the transformation of data into acoustic signals — may have considerable promise as a tool to enhance the communication of climate science. Daniel Crawford and Scott St. George report on a collaboration between scientists and artists that uses music to transmit the evidence of climate change in an engaging and visceral way.

Noah, Joseph, And High-Resolution Paleoclimatology

In 1968, Benoit Mandelbrot and James Wallis published an article titled ‘Noah, Joseph, and operational Hydrology’ in the journal Water Resources Research. In it, they argued that hydrological models of the day were not able to estimate the true risk of extreme floods or prolonged drought, and that rare hydrological events were much more common than usually assumed. In this lecture, I’ll review how high-resolution paleoenvironmental archives can help us judge more accurately the risks posed by the ‘Noah’- and ‘Joseph’-style events described by Mandelbrot and Wallis. I’ll give particular emphasis to the environmental information recovered from the rings of ancient trees, and explain how dendrochronology (tree-ring research) has been used to redefine the ‘flood of record’, test potential avenues for long-lead climate predictions, and gage the performance of state-of-the-art climate models.

A Song of Our Warming Planet: Using Music to Communicate Critical Concepts in...

When climate science is communicated to the broader public, many of its key findings are shared in the form of conceptual diagrams or information-dense data graphics. In this collaboration, we applied a data sonification approach to express NASA’s global temperature record as a musical composition for the cello. The resulting piece, which we titled ‘A Song of Our Warming Planet’, transformed 133 years of annual global temperature anomalies into a haunting, atonal melody that stretched across almost all of the instrument’s range. Since its release in June 2013, the song has been featured by several national and international media outlets, including the New York Times, the Weather Channel, and National Public Radio, and its accompanying video has received more than 140,000 views from nearly every corner of the world. We are currently preparing a new composition for string quartet that will add a geographic dimension to describe both the pace and place of global warming. We believe the success of our initial sonification project is testament to the power of music to reach audiences who respond less enthusiastically to traditional methods used to communicate climate science. We also imagine this approach could be applied more broadly to allow students to create novel, visceral, and memorable encounters with other aspects of the geophysical sciences.

Resonate! How 90 Seconds of Cello Music Is Helping People Connect With Climat...

Anthropogenic climate change is one of the most challenging problems humanity faces, but public opinion surveys show that many people are skeptical about global warming. In this seminar, Dan Crawford, Scott St. George and Todd Reubold will share their experiences with using music to help climate science reach out to new audiences. Their first collaboration — a music video that reconfigures global temperature data as a cello composition — has been described as “amazing, and eerie” and “an effective tool to show people that our planet is changing.” Join us to learn what global warming sounds like!

GEOG5839.22, Paleofloods