Strengths and limitations of tree-rings: Lessons from South American trees

FIDEL A. ROIG

Baeza, España

Workshop; The last 15ka of environmental change in Mediterranean regions. Interpreting different archives; 2005

Universidades de Dresden (Alemania) e Internacional de Andalucia

Dendrochronology or the analysis of the growth rings of trees is a technique for establishing the absolute date of environmental events. Under the principle that the growth rings on certain species of trees reflect present variations in environmental conditions, we can extend these deductions into the past centuries or millennia. Tree rings yield continuous, precisely dated proxies of annual climate, and in this context they provide more detail compared to any other biological or chemical sources of paleoenvironmental information. However, there are some perceptions on certain limitations of tree-ring data associated to the construction of past and future environmental scenarios. These limitations are partially explained by anatomical, biological, geographical, and conservational attributes of certain tree species and regions. The application of dendrochronology is relatively new in South America, but its development has rapidly grown during the last few decades. As a result, an increasing amount of information provided us criteria to select suitable tree species for tree-ring studies and hence supply a more comprehensive knowledge of strengths and limitations of dendrochronology. We discuss here the aforementioned concepts.