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

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

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