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.

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!!

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