Lab members recently presented at the 8th Annual Kent State Environmental Science & Design Research Symposium and at the KSU Undergraduate Research Symposium
Nae, Ana and Grace presented their research entitled “Applications of Dendrochronology: When Did a Living Forest Become a Ghost Forest?” They measured the widths of over 11,000 rings on 131 Atlantic White Cedar tree cores. This enabled them to determine the date of establishment of the live trees and develop a ring-width index to cross-date the samples from dead trees. They did this writing a lot of code in R (open source!). So far they’ve found the vast majority of the dead trees died in 2012 - the year of Hurricane Sandy. Their results provide another line of evidence of hurricane induced ghost forest formation and compliments several other projects in the lab.
A big thanks to Nick, Hana, Nikki and Tim for collecting the cores in the summer of 2021 and to Jeremy for mounting and sanding all of the cores. A total team effort!
Top image: Atlantic white cedar cores in the Biogeography & Landscape Dynamics Lab, Kent State University