Tree rings and climate: a long history

Zoom-Link
MeetingID: 68906493366 / Code: 990484

***********************************************

Dendrochronology - the study of the rings in trees - allows us to study climate history over the past ca. 2,000 years and to put current climate change in a long-term context. Dendrochronology sits at the nexus of climatology, ecology, and archeology and thus helps us to link climate history to forest history and human history.

In this talk, I will introduce the science of dendrochronology and I will guide the audience through its main applications in climatology, ecology, and archeology, with a wide variety of examples. I will recount some of the many stories the rings in trees can tell us.

CV
Dr. Valerie Trouet is the scientific director of the Belgian Climate Centre and professor in paleoclimatology at the University of Arizona (USA). She received her PhD in Bioscience engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) in 2004 and has previously worked at PennState University (USA) and the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL (Switzerland). She is a dendroclimatologist who uses the rings in trees to study climate change over the past ~2,000 years and how it has impacted human systems and ecosystems. She has published more than 100 scientific publications and is the author of Tree Story (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), a broad audience book about dendrochronology that has been translated in seven languages. She is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and received an honorary doctorate (2023) from Wageningen University (The Netherlands).