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In this course, students will learn the scientific basis, techniques, and applications of dendrochronology. We will explore the biological basis for dendrochronology, the principles upon which dendrochronology rests, and in which disciplines it has been applied. Examples will be drawn from several stages of the history of dendrochronology. At the end of the course, students will be able to collect tree-ring samples, prepare and date the samples, and build a local chronology. Finally, students will be able to evaluate dendrochronological analyses, and interpret their own data for specific research issues.
The class will meet Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30 to 10:45, Room 20 Mathematics East. A detailed outline of the topics covered in the lectures and lab is attached. Attendance is very important in the course, but is not included in grade calculation. Excessive absences may be grounds for dropping a student from the course. It is, however, the student's responsibility to drop the course officially; failure to do so will result in a grade of E or I, at the instructor's discretion. Special circumstances and/or disabilities will be accommodated on a case-by-case basis in accordance with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. Please let me know about any such needs as early as possible.
Required Text
There is no required text for the course. Interested students are encouraged
to buy the classic:
An Introduction to Tree-Ring Dating, Stokes,
M.A., and T. L. Smiley, 1968. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. (Reprinted
1995).
A packet of supplemental readings will be made available, password protected, at http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/introdendro/readings/. Readings should be completed before the class on that particular topic. It would also be a good idea for all students to check out the LTRR web site at http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu.
Laboratory meeting times will be arranged on the first day of class. Lab is required for the course and will meet once a week for approximately 3 hours. The lab will constitute a very important part of the course and of your grade. Topics covered in the lab include the practical aspects of crossdating, sample preparation and mounting, chronology building and interpretation, and the interpretation of different types of dendrochronological samples.
See the detailed Lab syllabus here.
See a detailed description of the laboratory excercises and sample sets, and suggested pace of work by clicking here.
There will be a mandatory weekend field trip, on a date to be arranged, to conduct dendrochronological sampling and observe sites. Additional information will be available in September. Topics demonstrated on the trip will be site and tree selection criteria, increment coring techniques, and other field procedures in a problem-oriented context.
Four homework exercises, designed to require use of the relevant literature and Internet, are required for undergraduate students (see below for topics and due dates). There will be two exams, a mid-term and a final, covering the lecture materials. In addition, there will be a practical lab exam covering the information and skills learned in the lab. This will take place on December 8 the last day of lab, and cannot be missed. The exams will constitute approximately one-fourth to one-third of the student grade. Finally, graduate students are required to (a) submit both electronically and as hard copy one annotated bibliography of the dendrochronological literature that includes at least 50 references-(see schedule for due dates), and (b) conduct and report on a research project specific to their area of interest (see below). The result should be in the form of a publishable paper or section of a thesis, dissertation, or proposal, and is due on the last regular day of class (Dec.8, 2009). Topics must be agreed with the instructor prior to submission.
| Undergraduate students | Graduate students | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homework 1-4 (25 X 4) | 100 points | Annotated bibliography | 100 points | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Mid-term Exam | 200 points | Mid-term Exam | 200 points | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Final Exam | 200 points | Final Exam | 200 points | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Laboratory Exam | 50 points | Laboratory Exam | 50 points | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Lab Exercises | 200 points | Lab Exercises | 200 points | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Graduate Paper Outline | 20 points | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Graduate Paper Final Draft | 230 points | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Undergraduate TOTAL | 750 points | Graduate TOTAL | 1000 points | ||||||||||||||||||||
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No incompletes will be given in this course, except under the most extraordinary circumstances. There is no extra credit. If the attached schedule conflicts with any major religious observances, please let me know immediately.
NOTE: This syllabus is available on-line at http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/introdendro/
| Date | Reading | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | ||
| August 25 | Introduction, Course Structure, Lab Intro | |
| August 27 | Haury 1962; Nijhuis 2005 | History of Dendrochronology |
| September 1 | History of Dendrochronology and LTRR | |
| September 3 | Stokes & Smiley 1968 | Dendrochronology - telling time using trees |
| September 8 | Fritts et al. 1965 | Site Chronologies - Dating |
| September 10 | LaMarche & Harlan 1973, Dunwiddie 1979 | Where do we find tree rings we can use? |
| September 15 | How to extract signal | |
| September 17 | Fritts et al. 1965 | Site and Tree Selection |
| September 22 | Fritts 1976 | Xylem and how rings are formed |
| September 24 | Smith & Shortle 1976 | What can we measure? |
| September 29 | Shroder 1980, Yamaguchi & Lawrence 1993, Jacoby et al. 1988 | Overview: Dendrogeomorphology (Erica Bigio) |
| October 1 | Applications: Dendrogeomorphology (Erica Bigio) | |
| October 3-4 | Weekend Field Trip | |
| October 6 | Kipfmueller & Swetnam 2001 | Overview: Dendroecology |
| October 8 | Applications: Dendroecology (Don Falk) | |
| October 13 | Swetnam & Betancourt 1998 | Applications: Dendroecology |
| October 15 | Mid-term exam | |
| October 20 | Dean et al. 1978, Dean et al. 1996 | Overview: Dendroarchaeology (Jeff Dean) |
| October 22 | Applications: Dendroarchaeology (Ron Towner) | |
| October 27 | Bonde 1993 | Applications: Dendroarchaeology (Pearce Paul Creasman) |
| October 29 | Touchan et al. 2005, 2008 | Applications: Dendroclimatology (Ramzi Touchan) |
| November 3 | Fritts et al. 1979, Hughes 2002; Stahle et al. 1992 | Overview: Dendroclimatology (Malcolm Hughes) |
| November 5 | Woodhouse & Lucas 2006, Woodhouse et al. 2006, Meko 2006 | Applications: Dendrohydrology (Connie Woodhouse) |
| November 10 | no class - Veterans day | |
| November 12 | Applications: Tree Rings in Ecohydrology (Kiyomi Morino) | |
| November 17 | Overview: Dendrochemistry (Paul Sheppard) | |
| November 19 | McCarroll & Loader 2004 | Overview: Global dendrochronology |
| November 24 | Graduate students present term papers to whole class | |
| November 26 | no class - Thanksgiving | |
| December 1 | Baillie 1995; | Overview: Isotopes in dendrochronology (Steve Leavitt) |
| December 3 | Appilications: Fossil Tree Rings (Adam Csank) |
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| December 8 | Review for final examination and Instructor evaluation | |
| Date | Event |
| September 17 | Homework #1 due (Undergrad students) |
| October 1 | Homework #2 due (Undergrad students) |
| October 8 | Grad paper provisional topic due |
| October 15 | Midterm exam |
| October 29 | Annotated Bibliography due (Grad students) |
| October 29 | Homework #3 due (Undergrad students) |
| November 3 | Graduate Paper outline due |
| December 3 | Homework #4 due (Undergrad students) |
| December 3 | Grad Student paper due |
| December 8, 1-4PM | Lab Practical Final |
| December 17, 8-10AM | Final Exam |
In short, these assignments consist of a 1-page summary of an article (not a web page!) pertaining to dendrochronology. The summary should include (a) the full reference of the article (i.e. how & where do I find it), (b) a summary of the main points of the work, and (c) a critical evaluation of the work (i.e. is it worth reading, and why?). The assignments must be submitted electronically to tswetnam@ltrr.arizona.edu and must have the word "Assignment" as the first word in the subject field.
Keep in mind that spelling, punctuation, and grammar count!! (One problem with e-mail is that people forget their English skills and view it as a conversation. It is not! Spell-check, grammar-check, and proof-read your summaries before you click "send").
Homework #1. Find, summarize and evaluate a paper or part of a book describing the scientific contributions of either Andrew E. Douglass, Bruno Huber or Ed Schulman. 25 points.
Homework #2. Find, summarize and evaluate a paper or part of a book containing information on annual rings in trees from the Tropics. 25 points.
Homework #3. Find, summarize and evaluate a paper, or part of a book containing information on tree rings in roots, branches and other woody structures than the stem, or in shrubs or bushes. 25 points.
Homework #4. Find, summarize and evaluate a paper or part of a book containing information on an application of dendrochronology to some field of science such as archeology, geomorphology, climatology or ecology. 25 points.
The format is:
Nesvetajlo, V.D., Consequences of the Tunguska catastrophe:
dendrochronoindication inference Planet. Space Sci., 1998,
46 (2/3): 155-161.
An explosion or impact by an unknown, large body occurred at about 6 to 8 km. elevation above the region of Tunguska in east-central Siberia on June 30, 1908. This resulted in damage for 60-80 km around an epicenter, with many millions of trees being blown down. The author visited the epicenter in 1990 and took increment cores from some of the trees left standing at the epicenter. He reports an attempt to infer details of the event from the nature of the rings formed in these trees in 1908 and subsequent years. His main findings were???. The data provided only partially support these conclusions because?.. The importance of these results is?.. The study could be extended and improved if the following were done??.. This is an informative and readable paper, based on careful work, although I found the author's interpretation of his observations to be somewhat unconvincing. Even so, he has laid the groundwork for future studies that could be informative.
The Graduate Student Paper should be a 15-20 page report (minimum type size 11 point, double spaced, 1 inch margins) on some original research, a pertinent literature review, or a proposal soliciting funding for a specific project. Depending on the type of project you choose, your paper should include (at a minimum) introduction, background research/discussion of the problem, field and lab methods, results, discussion, conclusion, and references cited sections. (A literature review is somewhat different--see me if you have questions).
The paper should be formatted in the style used by the major journal in your field (i.e. American Antiquity for archaeologists, The Holocene or International Journal of Climatology for paleoclimatologists, etc.). References, figures, and tables are included in the 15-20 page limit. Figures and tables should be legible, but I do not require that they be publication quality. The paper will be assessed both in terms of its content and in terms of the quality of the writing and presentation. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, style, and layout all count!
I encourage you to write something that fits precisely the requirements of this class, but that also serves some other purpose, for example a chapter of your thesis or dissertation, a paper for publication, or a proposal. This economy of effort, however, does not extend to using the same paper for two or more classes!
Readings
Baillie, M.G.L. (1995) A Slice Through Time: Dendrochronology and Precision Dating. Batsford, London, Pages 16 - 31.
Dean, J.S. (1978). Independent dating in Archeological analysis. Advances in archaeological method and theory 1, 223 - 255.
Dean, J.S., M.C. Slaughter and D.O. Bowden (1996). Desert dendrochronology: tree-ring dating prehistoric sites in the Tucson Basin. Kiva 62, 7 - 26.
Dunwiddie, P.W. (1979) Dendrochronological studies of indigenous New Zealand trees. New Zealand Journal of Botany 17, 251-266.
Fritts, H.C. (1976). Tree Rings and Climate. Academic Press, London. Pages 55 - 68.
Fritts, H.C., G.R. Lofgren and G.A. Gordon (1979) Variations in climate since 1602 as reconstructed from tree rings. Quaternary Research 12, 18 - 46.
Fritts, H.F., D.G. Smith, J.W. Cardis and C.A. Budelsky (1965). Tree-ring characteristics along a vegetation gradient in Northern Arizona. Ecology 46, 393-401.3.
Haury, E. (1962) HH-39. Tree-Ring Bulletin
Hughes, M.K. (2002) Dendrochronology in climatology - the state of the art. Dendrochronologia, 20, 95-116.
Jacoby, G.C., P.R. Sheppard and K.E. Sieh. Irregular recurrence of large earthuqakes along the San Adreas Fault: Evidence from trees. Science (1988) Science 241:196-199.
Kipfmueller, K. F. and T. W. Swetnam (2001) Using dendrochronology to reconstruct the history of ecosystems. Chapter 8, pages 199-228, In D. Egan and E. A. Howell eds., Techniques for Discovering Historic Ecosystems. Island Press, Washington.
LaMarche, Jr., V.C., and T.P. Harlan (1973). Accuracy of tree-ring dating of bristlecone pine for calibration of the radiocarbon time scale. Journal of Geophysical Research 78, 8849 - 8857.
McCarroll, D, and N.J. Loader. (2004) Stable isotopes in tree rings. Quaternary Science Reviews 23:771-801.
Meko, D.M. (2006) Tree ring inferences on water-level fluctuations of Lake Athabasca. Canadian Water Resources Journal 31(4):1-20.
Shroder, J.F. (1980) Dendrogeomorphology: review and new techniques of tree-ring dating. Progress in Physical Geography 4, 161 - 188.
Smith, K.C. and W.C. Shortle (1996). Tree biology and dendrochemistry. In: Dean et al. (eds), Tree Rings, Environment and Humanity. Radiocarbon, 629-635.
Stahle, D. W. and M.K. Cleaveland (1992) Reconstruction and analysis of spring rainfall over the southeastern U.S. for the past 1000 years. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 73, 1947 - 1961.
Stokes, M.A., and T. L. Smiley (1968). An Introduction to Tree-Ring Dating, University of Arizona Press, Tucson. (Reprinted 1995).Pages xi - xiii, xv - xvii, 3 - 20.
Swetnam, T. W. and J. L. Betancourt (1998) Mesoscale disturbance and ecological response to decadal climatic variability in the American Southwest. Journal of Climate 11:3128-3147.
Woodhouse, C.A. and J.J Lukas (2006) Drought, tree rings and water management in Colorado. Canadian Water Resources Journal 31(4):297-310.
Woodhouse, C.A., S.T. Gray, and D.M. Meko (2006) Updated streamflow reconstructions for the Colorado Rive. Water Resources Research 42, W05415, doi:10.1029/2005WR004455.
Yamaguchi, D. K. and D.B. Lawrence (1993) Tree-ring evidence for 1842 - 1843 eruptive activity at the Goat Rocks dome, Mount St. Helens, Washington. Bulletin of Volcanology 55, 264 - 272.