No Cover Image

Journal article 512 views 95 downloads

An evaluation of english oak earlywood vessel area as a climate proxy in the UK

Darren Davies, Neil Loader Orcid Logo

Dendrochronologia, Volume: 64, Start page: 125777

Swansea University Authors: Darren Davies, Neil Loader Orcid Logo

  • 55420.pdf

    PDF | Version of Record

    Distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) License.

    Download (2.76MB)

Abstract

This research evaluates the usefulness of oak earlywood vessel area as a climate proxy in the western United Kingdom (UK). The results demonstrate that at this site earlywood vessel area contains a different environmental signal (March relative humidity) to a ring-width chronology developed from the...

Full description

Published in: Dendrochronologia
ISSN: 1125-7865
Published: Elsevier BV 2020
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa55420
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Abstract: This research evaluates the usefulness of oak earlywood vessel area as a climate proxy in the western United Kingdom (UK). The results demonstrate that at this site earlywood vessel area contains a different environmental signal (March relative humidity) to a ring-width chronology developed from the same trees. The vessel area signal passes commonly used verification statistics and was found to be representative of the climate of a similar geographic area to other tree-ring proxies, albeit with a lower explained variance. Taking the average of all the vessels identified for each year weakened the reconstructed climate signal and it was found for this study that the average of the 10 largest vessels provided the strongest and most stable match. The results demonstrate earlywood vessel area of oak in the UK has potential as a climate proxy, but that further work to strengthen and characterise the climatic target variable controlling vessel area is required.
Keywords: Tree-rings; Earlywood vessel area; Climate proxy; Relative humidity; Quercus
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering
Funders: UKRI, NE/P011527/1
Start Page: 125777