Our 2023-2024 Focus Area is Building a western U. S. tree-ring network sourced in the U. S. national forest inventory

Forests provide humanity with numerous ecosystem services and benefits. They provide drinking water and help maintain clean air, provide habitat for wildlife, and draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. The last of these has drawn recent attention to forests as a “nature-based climate solution”, which would attempt to limit climate warming by enhancing the carbon sink strength of forest ecosystems. But there is great scientific uncertainty about how forests will respond to stresses associated with climate change and other global change factors, including the impact of drought stress on tree growth.

Our work in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research leverages the annual-resolution information on tree growth encoded in tree rings to better quantify the impact of climate variability and change on carbon sequestration by forests. Ongoing projects focus on forest carbon dynamics in the state of Arizona, across the interior western U. S., and in the temperate rain forests and temperate coniferous forests of the west coast of the U. S.

Our work supports forest-based climate mitigation at a national scale, i.e., meeting emissions reductions targets the U. S. established via the Paris Climate Agreement. We collaborate with the U.S. Forest Service and other forest management entities to improve measurement, reporting, and verification of forest carbon dynamics, and facilitate forest management aimed at climate resilience.