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Dendrochemistry: Tools for Evaluating Variations in Past and Present Forest...
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Dendrochemistry: Tools for Evaluating Variations in Past and Present Forest Environments (2nd Edition)

A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Wood Science and Forest Products".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2025 | Viewed by 1086

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Paul R Sheppard

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
Interests: dendrochemistry; dendrogeomorphology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Dendrochemistry, the measurement of inorganic elements in tree growth rings followed by the analysis and interpretation of changes in environmental chemistry through time, is both promising and challenging. For environmental situations in which the abundance of one or multiple elements has changed through time, the direct monitoring of environmental chemistry might not extend very far back in time, if at all. Therefore, estimating the past elemental abundance of a site using trees is enticing. Even tree-ring records that are just between 20 and 30 years in length, which would be considered short in traditional dendrochronological applications, could be usefully long in dendrochemistry. Given that dendrochemistry truly works, it could be applied to many environmental situations such as long-term changes in forest soil chemistry (e.g., N or P), abrupt elemental changes due to natural causes (e.g., ash deposits from explosive volcanic eruptions), or subtle increases in elements that might be harmful to human health (e.g., various metals) due to inadvertent contamination. 

However, as a young subdiscipline of tree-ring analysis, dendrochemistry still has issues that hamper its use in environmental reconstruction and analysis. For example, to what extent do the fundamentals of dendrochronology, such as site and tree selection, as well as replication and sample size, underpin dendrochemistry research? How are technical issues in the measurement of trace amounts of elements in wood dealt with and solved? What temporal frequencies are suitable for analysis of dendrochemical measurements and which are less suitable? Must measurements in dendrochemistry stay in absolute units to be useful, or is relative change through time useful? To what extent does the movement of elements across tree rings exist? 

This Special Issue will compile examples of research that speaks to issues of dendrochemistry and/or applies it to interesting environmental chemistry situations.

Dr. Paul R Sheppard
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • dendrochemistry
  • environmental chemistry monitoring
  • dendrochronology
  • point source contamination
  • non-point source pollution
  • inorganic elements
  • element translocation

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Related Special Issue

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 3776 KiB  
Article
The Application of Dendrochemistry to Assess Recent Changes in Environmental Chemistry of Urban Areas
by Paul R. Sheppard and Mark L. Witten
Forests 2025, 16(5), 761; https://doi.org/10.3390/f16050761 - 30 Apr 2025
Viewed by 441
Abstract
Dendrochemistry was applied to a small town, Taylorville, Illinois, which has a superfund site and apparently more cases of cancer than expected based on background rates. As an ecologic study, dendrochemistry is not intended to unequivocally associate particular elements to specific illnesses, but [...] Read more.
Dendrochemistry was applied to a small town, Taylorville, Illinois, which has a superfund site and apparently more cases of cancer than expected based on background rates. As an ecologic study, dendrochemistry is not intended to unequivocally associate particular elements to specific illnesses, but rather dendrochemistry serves more generally to characterize changes in element availability through time, which then might lead to follow-up epidemiological studies. In Taylorville, multiple elements measured in decadal chunks of tree rings of 12 trees showed no trend though time going back several decades. This non-result is important, demonstrating that element concentrations can remain constant across tree rings. By contrast, multiple other elements showed an uptick in concentration beginning by about 2000. Some of these elements are known to be harmful to human health, while others are not. More broadly, it could be of interest to consider increases through time in multiple metals as a combined burden in public health. Spatially, tree sampling for dendrochemistry is often not dense enough to isolate sources of element availability. Other techniques of environmental monitoring exist for elucidating spatial patterns of elements, and leaf surface chemistry is recommendable as a companion technique for dendrochemistry to discover spatial and temporal environmental patterns. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Dendrochemistry: Tools for Evaluating Variations in Past and Present Forest Environments (2nd Edition))
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16 pages, 4198 KiB  
Article
Early- and Latewood vs. Stem Asymmetry: Which Is More Important for Dendrochemistry in Scots Pine?
by Vladimir L. Gavrikov, Alexey I. Fertikov, Ruslan A. Sharafutdinov and Eugene A. Vaganov
Forests 2025, 16(3), 493; https://doi.org/10.3390/f16030493 - 11 Mar 2025
Viewed by 357
Abstract
For dendrochemical research, it may be important to be aware of the effects of stem asymmetry and the intra-ring structure because these may introduce unwanted dispersion in the results. In dendrochemical studies, separate analysis of the elemental content of early- and latewood is [...] Read more.
For dendrochemical research, it may be important to be aware of the effects of stem asymmetry and the intra-ring structure because these may introduce unwanted dispersion in the results. In dendrochemical studies, separate analysis of the elemental content of early- and latewood is rare. Also, explanations of how the elemental content may relate to stem asymmetry originating from conditions at the edges of contrasting environments are largely lacking in these studies. The purpose of the current study was to estimate the impact of the seasonal tree ring structure and stem asymmetry on the distribution of elements in tree stems. The study population was a plantation of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) at an afforestation experiment area, with the sample trees being at the edge of the stand, causing strong crown asymmetry. Six pine trees were cored through the thickness from the maximal crown side (max-side) to the minimal crown side (min-side), and the cores were subsequently scanned through an Itrax Multiscanner unit. The count rates of aluminum (Al), silicon (Si), phosphorus (P), sulfur (S), chlorine (Cl), calcium (Ca), iron (Fe), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), and strontium (Sr) in the tree rings from 1990 to 2022 were analyzed. A group of elements (Al, Si, P, S, and Cl) tended to consistently concentrate on the min-side, both in early- and latewood, the difference being most significant for S and Cl. Regarding early- vs. latewood, Al, Si, P, S, Cl, Cu, and Zn always had lower concentration in earlywood than in latewood, while others (Ca, Fe, and Sr) had lower concentrations in latewood, the relations being consistently significant. Overall, the role of the min- or max-side of the stem in allocation of elements appears to have been weaker that the intra-ring structure (early- and latewood). Some elements such as Al, Si, P, S, Cl, and Ca (in latewood) were often more abundant on the min-side; other elements such as Fe and Sr (in latewood) were often more abundant on the max-side, but these relations were significant only on rare occasions. Intra-ring heterogeneity (in early- and latewood) appears to be more decisive than the asymmetry of the tree stem in regard to the distribution of elements in Scots pine xylem. Nevertheless, tree stems with high and obvious asymmetry should be more extensively explored because a possibility remains that extreme asymmetry does impact the allocation of elements. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Dendrochemistry: Tools for Evaluating Variations in Past and Present Forest Environments (2nd Edition))
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