Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology – The study of tree rings.

This is my favourite course that I have taken so far! We were out in the woods in the 2nd week of term practicing taking tree cores and analysing them to infer climatic changes. Its a small class, there is only 6 people, so its really nice, and we get to work together a lot, and have some good class discussions.

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First time taking a tree core!

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Very proud of ourselves that it actually worked!
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The best homework I have been set since I got here – Sand down the mounted tree cores so we can see the tree rings clearly.

Our final project for this class is a ‘service learning project’, which involves all 6 of us working together on a project for the US forest service to create chronologies of 40 trees at Redrocks (in the woods just next to the lake). We sampled 2 tree species, and as there was 6 of us, it only took one afternoon to collect all the samples!!

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The core of a red cedar.

For our final project we got to use the belt sander instead of sanding by hand as we had 80 cores to prepare!

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Some of our cores all sanded and ready to be analysed!

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