Applications of Dendroarchaeological Data for Understanding Paleoenvironmental Change: Opportunities and Challenges

Keywords: tree rings, dendrochronology, paleoenvironment, dendroarchaeology
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Dendroarchaeological data from historic structures and artifacts have the potential to spatially and temporally extend living tree-ring chronologies, especially where old-growth forests have been extensively modified or removed. While these data may contribute to an improved understanding of past climates and ecologies, critical differences in the properties of live-tree and historic-timber data might affect results and interpretations of large-scale studies, such as those pulling large datasets from public databases like the International Tree-Ring Data Bank (ITRDB). The objective of this work was to compare tree-ring summary measures of live-tree vs. historic-timber datasets likely to affect outcomes and inferences of typical paleoenvironmental applications. We used 99 live-tree and 41 historic timber datasets collected in the Appalachian region of the eastern United States and compared common analytical measures for understanding past climate and ecology, including temporal coverage, species composition, recruitment patterns, segment length, RBAR, EPS, and response to climate events. We found that tree-ring data from historic timbers record ecological events similarly to live trees and are sensitive to climate conditions, with important caveats related to the influence of site and tree selection and other biases on analytical measures. In some cases, these caveats can be overcome through improved collection of metadata and additional analyses. In all cases, potential differences in live-tree and historic timber data must be considered by those who perform large-scale analyses using public tree-ring databases, especially as more scientists contribute historic timber datasets.