Dave Stahle and Mauri Timonen - Dendroclimatic Examination of Sub-fossil Pine

Dr. Dave Stahle research interests include all aspects of dendrochronology, particularly climate change and the proxy evidence for past variation in the El Nino/Southern Oscillation and other large scale atmospheric circulations. Dr Stahle has developed GIS-based predictive models for the location of ancient forests, and is conducting active research in the United States, Mexico and Africa. Dr. Stahle's research is funded by NOAA , NSF , NPS and the USGS and he has published in a variety of journals including, Science, Nature, Journal of Climate and Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Dr. Stahle has taught courses in Physical Geography and Conservation of Natural Resources. http://www.uark.edu/misc/dendro/

Mr. Mauri Timonen works in the Northern Regional Unit of Metla (the Finnish Forest Research Institute). He has over 30 years of experience in growth and yield studies and since 1993 he has been very active in developing international dendrochronology. In 1994 he introduced Finnish “sub-aqua dendrochronology and had a major role in producing the 7644 year “supra-long” tree ring chronology of timberline pine stretching back to 5633 BC. He is a member of the “Finland Lustia Dendrochronology Project” for which one of his missions is to build reliable RCS models providing more information for studies of global climate change. Mauri is dedicated to developing a database for tree-ring data and tree-ring analysis applications. He and his team have developed a tree-ring laboratory built around a “Finnish” tree-ring data format and supporting software called the “KINSYS Toolbox”. Their software is highly compatible with the ITRDB format, thus providing some unique tools for common data manipulation and tree-ring analysis (http://lustiag.pp.fi).

Emilia Gutierrez and Ed Cook - Dendrohydrologic Study of Bog Pine Environments

Dr. Emilia Guitierrez is professor of Ecology and Forest Ecology (Department of Ecology, University of Barcelona in Spain) since 1991. Her Ph.D. (1987) was on dendrochronology and it was the first thesis in Spain dealing with this topic. To Emilia dendrochronology is one of the most interesting ways of doing ecology, the study of living things and their relationships with the environment. Trees, in their tree-rings, keep memory of all those events and environmental factors that have had any significant effect on them throughout their lives. With such information we can use it to understand those environmental factors (abiotic and biotic) that have had a major influence on tree growth, on their population structure and forest dynamics, etc. As a dendrochronologist, Emilia been using tree-ring data to study ecological process, e.g. assessing how climate limits tree growth, how treeline ecotones behave due to global change, the occurrence and extent of forest disturbances such as fires and snow avalanches and the pace and pattern of long-term complex ecological processes such as succession and treeline shifts. She and her students, members of Dendroecology at the Dept of Ecology, work and on many dendrochronological projects together including the characterization of tree-ring formation and phenology of several Mediterranean tree species.

Dr. Ed Cook is the director of the Tree-Ring Lab at the Lamont-Dorherty Earth Observatory, of Columbia University in the City of New York. Before nearly completing his batchelors degree at the University of Arizona in Wildlife Biology he discovered tree-rings at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and has been a student of dendrochronology ever since. Ed’s most cited contribution is the program ARSTAN developed for his PhD dissertation and his application of autoregressive analysis techniques applied to tree-ring data. But his interests in numerical methods in dendrochronology have taken him around the world in the search for challenging questions requiring challenging solutions. Ed’s current interest is in the reconstruction of global drought. Working in collaboration with scientists from around the world he hopes one day to produce a global atlas of the earth’s drought history. Apart from the hundreds of articles, programs and books he has written or co-authored, he remains a firm believer that knowledge should be free. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/trl

Samuli Helama and Rob Wilson - Riparian Dendrochronology

Dr. Samuli Helama earned his PhD in Geology and Paleontology at the University of Helsinki in 2004. Since then his research has delved into the tree-ring behavior in the context of the “millennia-long” tree-ring chronologies of Finland, based on the mid and late Holocene pine megafossils. Apart from dendrochronology, his studies have also dealt with sclerochronology, phenology and human ecology. He is currently working as postdoctoral fellow at Arctic Centre, University of Lapland. http://www.helsinki.fi/science/dendro/DendrochronologicalResearch.html

Dr. Rob Wilson is a Lecturer in Physical Geography in the School of Geography & Geosciences at the University of St Andrews and has been a dendrochronologist since 1994. He is passionate about using tree-rings to understand environmental change with specific emphasis on the reconstruction of past climate. He has also dabbled in the use of corals and historical archives for studying past climate as they allow the examination of different seasons and regions. Rob has recently set up a Tree-Ring Laboratory at St Andrews (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rjsw/TRL/) with a current long term aim of developing a long ~8000 year pine chronology for Scotland using living, historical and lake preserved sub-fossil material. In the spring and late summer, he can be often seen running through the Scottish Highlands with corer in hand looking for old trees and candidate lakes.

Katarina Cufar and Kevin Smith - Tree-Biology and Tree Growth

Dr. Katarina Cufar is a professor at the Department of Wood Science and Technology, Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She teaches wood anatomy, wood structure and related topics and leads the team of Wood Science. The research in her lab is focused in investigations of wood structure, wood formation, the process of phloem formation and its role for tree survival and dendrochronology. Recently her team published the 548 year oak chronology based on material from living trees and historic constructions. This is among the longest oak chronologies southeast of the Alps and contains a clear signal of June precipitation and temperature that has been used to reconstruct seasonal climate conditions over the last five centuries, confirmed by historical reports. Her team also studies wood from the distant past, the ancient Roman period and prehistoric copper age (late Neolithic) period. Many of these investigations mentioned are performed with a long list of scientists from different countries who contribute valuable expertise and insights to the her lab’s activities. http://www.les-dendro.com http://les.bf.uni-lj.si/pedagogi/po-abecedi/katarina-cufar/zanimivo/

Dr. Kevin T. Smith is a plant physiologist for the US Forest Service, stationed in Durham, New Hampshire. He is also an affiliate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of New Hampshire. Kevin’s research focuses on the response of trees to injury, infection, and environmental change. One research aspect has been the physiological and anatomical shifts associated with the compartmentalization of infection after mechanical injury of living wood. This work has been applied to the anatomy of fire scars and role of wound response in tree survival after fire injury. Kevin has also worked on the relationship of growth to overall tree and forest health. Recent research has examined the temporal stability of the growth and climate relationship and the use of spectral analysis to identify climatic and non-climatic signals in the tree-ring record. Kevin leads a Forest Service research work unit described at: http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/units/foresthealth/ and his personal research is described at: http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/people/ktsmith .

Jaques Tardif and Jim Speer- Forest Growth & Sustainability

Dr. Jacques Tardif was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Dendrochronology in 2002. He is currently a professor at the University of Winnipeg (central Canada) and a member of the Centre for Forest Interdisciplinary Research (CFIR). He is an instructor in forest ecology and he teaches, among others, forest measurement and dendrochronology. Dr. Tardif’s main research objectives are to obtain a better understanding of the linkage between forest disturbances in the boreal forest and climate variability; to develop a better understanding of the ecology of tree species reaching their distribution limit; to get more insight into the past and present climate of Central Canada using climate reconstruction derived from tree-rings. Dr. Tardif is also involved in applying knowledge gained from dendroecology to forest ecosystem management. In recent years his research has focused on insect outbreak reconstructions, forest gap dynamics, the use of stable carbon isotopes and, the study of tree-ring anomalies such as false rings, light rings and anomalous vessels in ring-porous species. http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/index/CRC-Tardif

Dr. Jim Speer is an Associate Professor of Geography and Geology in the Department of Earth and Environmental Systems at Indiana State University. He received his master’s degree from the University of Arizona, Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, in 1997 and his PhD from the University of Tennessee in 2001. He specializes in dendroecology with a focus on disturbance ecology and pushing the frontiers of tree-ring research. He has conducted the first dendrochronological insect outbreak studies on pandora moth (Coloradia pandora) and periodical cicadas (Magicicada sp.) and has examined the potential of tropical tree-ring research in the Dominican Republic. He is currently examining fire history in the United States eastern deciduous forest in a suite of hardwood trees. He has been the president of the Tree-Ring Society since 2008 and the organizer for the North American Dendroecological Fieldweek for the past seven years.