UMn Center for Dendrochronology

Starting in 30 minutes! Everyone is welcome.

Please join us next Thursday for Uday Kunwar's defense of his doctoral dissertation in Geography.

The first portion of the defense, which is titled 'Investigating changes in forest growth and atmospheric circulation in the Himalayan region during the past four centuries' will be open to the public via the Zoom platform. All are welcome!

Date: May 7, 2020
Time: 10AM (GMT-5)
Zoom link: https://umn.zoom.us/j/93514856752

Please join us next Thursday for Uday Kunwar's defense of his doctoral dissertation in Geography.

The first portion of the defense, which is titled 'Investigating changes in forest growth and atmospheric circulation in the Himalayan region during the past four centuries' will be open to the public via the Zoom platform. All are welcome!

Date: May 7, 2020
Time: 10AM (GMT-5)
Zoom link: https://umn.zoom.us/j/93514856752

Kudos to Matthew Trumper, a UMN Geography B.S. student, who has received a prestigious NOAA Summer Fellowship for 2019.

Matthew will participate in the Great Lakes Summer Fellows Program at NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab (GLERL) in Ann Arbor, MI. "Through this program, students work on substantive research issues in the Great Lakes and undergo a career training program that equips them with the knowledge and skills to be the next generation of Great Lakes scientists”. Specifically, he will be working with Dr. Jia Wang, Dr. Hongyan Zhang and Dr. James Kessler looking at Great Lakes Ice Climate and its Impacts on the Water Quality of Lake Erie.

This exceptional opportunity is well timed for Matthew, who will graduate in May with a B.S. in Geography summa cm laude, plus a minor in statistics. Matthew has already developed a remarkable curriculum vitae that includes two UMN UROP awards, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for the Undergraduate (REU) award, and a 2018 outstanding paper award from the West Lakes. In two weeks time, he will defend his senior honors thesis on research with tree-rings and experimental nitrogen cycle dynamics at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. Since his freshman year, Matthew has a been a stand out member of our department’s undergraduate and research communities. This award is very well deserved. Congratulations!

NDSU and UMN Researchers to Unearth Old Red River Flood Evidence

NDSU and UMN Researchers to Unearth Old Red River Flood Evidence — Ag News from NDSU Researchers will look for flood evidence in bur oaks and structures built from them.

Congratulations to Liam Martin who successfully defended his MA Thesis in Geography this week! His thesis examined fire history along three sites along the Bois Brule River in N. Wisconsin. The area was an important place for the Ojibwe and other travelers, with the Brule serving as a critical link between the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers and Lake Superior. Nice job, Liam!

We're so pleased to welcome Dr. Farid Seyfullayev as a visiting scientist with the Dendro Center this autumn.

Dr. Seyfullayev, who works with the Azerbaijan National Academy of Science's Central Botanical Garden in Baku, was awarded a grant by the US Fulbright to support his visit to Minneapolis. During his stay, Dr. Seyfullayev will study how climate influences the growth of oak forests in Azerbaijan.

Welcome to Minnesota Farid!

We're seeking an MA/PhD student to join an NSF-funded project on extreme paleofloods in the Red River of the North. The position includes academic year and summer funding, plus training opportunities with collaborators at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research and the USGS Dakota Water Center.

Please visit the link or contact Scott St. George ([email protected]) for more information.

Funded graduate position in paleoflood hydrology, University of Minnesota I’m seeking to recruit a graduate student (beginning Fall 2019) to join an NSF-funded project on extreme paleofloods on the northern Great Plains. This position, which will be co-supervised by me and Dr. Joe Zeleznik (North Dakota State University), will combine methods from dendrochronology,...

Kurt and two grad assistants managed to make it out to Stockton Island for some field sampling and inventory in a coastal red pine barrens. Beautiful site. Thankful for the phenomenal boat driving ability and hospitality of NPS personnel.

During the first half of the second millennium, the American West was plagued by a succession of decades-long dry spells. Could it happen again?

On the cover of this month's Physics Today: 'Unraveling the mysteries of megadrought' by Toby Ault (Cornell University) and Scott St. George.

Unraveling the mysteries of megadrought During the first half of the second millennium, the American West was plagued by a succession of decades-long dry spells. Could it happen again?

We're of Dendro Center alum Erika Eidson, who led a new study demonstrating that Great Basin bristlecone pines are uniquely resilient to mountain pine beetles. It's an important contribution, and we're so proud of Erika and all her successes since graduating from our group.

Low offspring survival in mountain pine beetle infesting the resistant Great Basin bristlecone pine supports the preference-performance hypothesis

What have tree rings told us about Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the past millennia? A new paper by a team of German, American, Swedish, Swiss, and British scientists, including Scott St. George, reviews what we’ve learned from tree rings as paleothermometers and recommends ways we might improve our understanding of climate change during the last thousand years.

Large-scale, millennial-length temperature reconstructions from tree-rings Over the past two decades, the dendroclimate community has produced various annually resolved, warm season temperature reconstructions for the extratropical Northern Hemisphere. Here we compare these tree-ring based reconstructions back to 831 CE and present a set of basic metrics to provide guidanc...

The 10th WorldDendro Congress has begun in Bhutan. Today a bunch of us visited Paro Taktsang (The Tiger's Nest), among the most sacred of all Buddhist Monasteries. Tomorrow we're off to Bhumthang for the fieldweek with an exceptional group including Ed Cook, Paul Krusic, Jonathan Palmer, Kathy Allen, Kevin Anchukaitis, Neil Pederson, Andy Bunn, Kristina Seftigen, Jesper Bjorklund, Bethany Coulthard, Jim Speer, Santosh Shah, Jill Harvey, Jessie Pearl, Talia Anderson, Dan Griffin, and many more. The actual conference begins in Thimphu on June 10.

Matthew Trumper, an honors undergrad in geography and statistics, has a National Science Foundation (NSF) REU in the Griffin Lab this summer. We're finally putting this WSL core microtome to good use!

The 2017–18 academic year was a great one for the Griffin Lab. Most of the crew was back for their second or third year, and four finished their academic years at UMN. Jacob Arndt earned his MGIS degree and is off to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Erin Jones, Emily Nagel, and Madison Sherwood each graduated with honors in Geography, and are off for some fun and exciting summers. Thanks for everything, and best of luck with your future endeavors. Stop back to visit!

Our first pilot study of peeled red pines is (finally) out for one small site. Now we have a few more...
https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s41636-018-0102-2?author_access_token=WVLUSVeM9izRPSB1zswjhPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY6oSLIC9_j86PF-luZ_egip3rAI4kZJY4Qn5s33ZN_pySbSsHktEv5WHHPcDJxxHazWpiZvktzRozQdNMqIw9505PkU4QiTCnJamR5O6unCfg%3D%3D

Culturally Modified Red Pine, Birch-Bark Canoes, and the Strategic Geography of the Fur Trade on Lake Saganaga, Minnesota, U.S.A.

Lots of productivity in the the Kipfmueller Lab in the last few weeks: Emily Nagel defended her undergraduate honors thesis on cambium phenology of red pine in Minnesota. Liam Martin made presentations fire history in NW Wisconsin and was recognized as the outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant of the year. Elizabeth Schneider gave presentations on time-space synchrony of fire events in the Border Lakes region, and was awarded a UMN Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2018–2019. Excellent work everyone, congrats!

Great High Country News story by Maya Kapoor on new research by Bryan Black, Dan Griffin, and others on climate extremes and rising biological synchrony in western North America: https://www.hcn.org/articles/weather-climate-extremes-are-putting-species-in-sync-and-in-danger

Climate extremes are putting species in sync – and in danger Shifts in coastal weather systems could make the West’s species less resilient.

Talia Anderson's UMN undergrad honors project has been published in the Journal of Latin American Geography, with Griffin, Anchukaitis, Pons, and Taylor: 'Climate Sensitivity and Potential Vulnerability of Guatemalan Fir Forests in Totonicapán, Guatemala' https://muse.jhu.edu/article/692066

Project MUSE - Climate Sensitivity and Potential Vulnerability of Guatemalan Fir (Abies guatemalensis) Forests in Totonicapán, Guatemala Despite continued forest loss and extensive demand for wood products throughout Guatemala, the locally managed and protected forests of Totonicapán remain some of the most intact within the country. Here, we study the growth rings of Guatemalan fir (Pinaceae, Abies guatemalensis Rehder, pinabete) a...

Tanner Johnson is headed to NASA for the summer! An Environmental and Ecological Engineering major working with the Griffin Lab, he is headed to Athens GA to participate in the NASA DEVELOP Program. Congrats Tanner!

BBC Science News story on the Mainz/Minnnesota study led by Dr. Claudia Hartl on the enduring legacy of the German super battleship Tirpitz’s deployment to Norway in modern-day forests.

N**i legacy found in Norwegian trees The chemical fog used to hide the Tirpitz battleship in WWII stunted the growth of trees.

For part of American Public Media's Water Main Series (https://www.americanpublicmedia.org/water/), Dan Griffin was featured on Minnesota Public Radio's ClimateCast yesterday, April 5, 2018. The background music is A-MAZING: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/414685982/climate-cast

The Water Main