Post by Ana Camila Gonzalez, Undergraduate Researcher with Neil Pederson and the Tree Ring Laboratory at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

As an undergraduate student interning at the Tree Ring Lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, my involvement with PalEON has been rather localized to the data production side of things. My knowledge on the dynamics of climate and the models involved in forecasting future climate change is obviously limited as a second-year student. My knowledge on how frustrating it can be to cross-date the rings in Maple trees, however, is more extensive.

This past summer I was able to join the Tree Ring Lab on a fieldwork trip to Harvard Forest in Petersham, MA. My main task was to map each plot where we cored, recording the species of each tree cored, its distance to the plot center, its DBH, its canopy position, its compass orientation, and any defining characteristics (the tree was rotten, hollow, had two stems, etc.). The forest was beautiful, but it became more beautiful every time I wrote down the letters QURU (Quercus rubra)– I had plenty of experience with oaks, and knew that they did not often create false or missing rings and are thus a fairly easy species to cross-date. I shuddered a little every time I had to write down BEAL (Betula alleghaniensis), however, since I had looked at a few yellow birches before and knew the rings were sometimes impossible to see let alone cross-date. I had no reaction to the letters ACRU (Acer rubrum), however, since I had never looked at a red maple core before. I was happy that it was a tree I could easily identify, and so I didn’t mind that the letters kept coming up. Had I known what was to come, I would’ve found a way to prevent anyone from putting a borer to a red maple.

At first, the maples seemed to be my friends. The rings were sensitive enough that multiple marker years helped me figure out where the missing rings where, what was false and what was real. I morbidly became a fan of the gypsy moth outbreak of 1981, because in many cases (but not all) it produced a distinct white ring that marked that year very clearly. This was definitely challenging, as the trees also seemed to be locally sensitive (a narrow ring in one tree might not at all be present in another) but all in all it seemed to be going well.

And then came the Zombie Maples.

Fig (a) Anatomy of a White Ring: Above is a core collected in 2003. It was alive. The white ring in the center of the image is 1981, the year of the regional gypsy moth outbreak in New York and New England.

That white ring you’re seeing above is the characteristic 1981 ring from a Zombie Maple cored in 2003. After that ring we can only see four rings – but this tree is alive, which means that there should be 13 rings after 1990 (Fig b). This means approximately 10 are missing.

Fig (b) Anatomy of a Zombie Maple: Above is a core collected in 2003. It was alive. The 1990 ring is marked in the image just right of center. There should be 13 rings between 1990 and the bark. You can only see four. Is it Alive? Is it Dead? Eek! It is a Zombie!!

This kind of suppression in the last two decades was present in multiple cores, and it made many perfectly alive trees seem like they should have been dead. Nine rings missing in a little over one millimeter. We see even more severe cases in our new collection: 15 rings where there should be 30 rings in about 2 millimeters – how is this tree supporting itself?

Cross-dating these cores took a lot longer than planned, and at times I was tempted to pretend my box of maples went missing, but afterwards I felt I was a much stronger cross-dater, and I’m realizing more and more that this really matters. If you’re going to base a model off of data that involves ring-width measurements from particular years, you better make sure you have the right years. What if we didn’t know the gypsy moth outbreak occurred in 1981, and somebody counting the rings back on the Zombie maple core above was led to believe it occurred in 1996? Our understanding of the trigger for this event would be incorrect because we would be looking for evidence from the wrong decade.

In a way, the Maples are still my friends. They were almost like the English teacher in high school who graded harshly who you didn’t appreciate until you realized how much better your writing had become.