Post by Dave Moore, Professor at The University of Arizona
This post also appeared on the Paleonproject Tumblr

We spent a lot of time last week in Tucson discussing sampling protocols for PalEON’s tree ring effort that will happen this summer. The trouble is that trees (like other plants) will self thin over time and when we collect tree cores to recreate aboveground biomass increment we have to be careful about how far back in time we push our claims. Bonus points if you can explain the photo in ecological terms! I stole it from Rachel Gallery’s Ecology class notes.

Neil Pederson and Amy Hessl will be taking the lead in the North East while Ross Alexander working with Dave Moore and Val Trouet (LTRR) will push our sampling into the Midwest and beyond the PalEON project domain westwards. This is a neat collaboration between the PalEON project and another project funded by the DOE. Francesc Montane and Yao Liu who recently joined my lab will be helping to integrate these data into the Community Land Model. Also Mike Dietze‘s group will be using the ED model to interpret the results.

Because we want to integrate these data into land surface models we need to have a robust statistical framework so we had some equally robust discussions about statistical considerations with Chris Paciorek and Jason McLachlan and other members of the PalEON team.