Tree Ring Project
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Bonanza Creek Schoolyard LTER
Tree Ring Study
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Schools that are participating in the Schoolyard LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research) program are invited to become involved in a tree-ring study at their school or a nearby site. The key contact is Dr. Glenn Juday (gjuday@lter.uaf.edu). The study will involve a class in the following activities:

  1. permanently tagging trees (so we can relate each sample back to its location in the field and follow these trees in the future),
  2. drilling trees with a tool called an increment borer,
  3. gluing extracted wood cores to mounting sticks,
  4. sanding the wood cores smooth
  5. viewing the cores under a binocularscope
  6. counting and marking the rings.
The cores will be measured at the University of Alaska Tree-Ring Lab, and classes can plot the data once they are available. The outdoor work of drilling the trees can be done as long as temperatures are above freezing or even slightly below. We would like to have about 10 good cores each from white spruce, black spruce, paper birch, and aspen from each locality. The tree-ring study is still worth doing if only 1 or 2 species are available at a site. We are trying to build a network of 10 or more new tree-ring sites across the Fairbanks-North Star Borough. School grounds are very good places to sample, as long as they have a reasonable chance to remain in tree cover. Otherwise, nearby natural resource properties (parks, managed forests, wildlife areas, etc.) are useable sites. Teachers should take the responsibility to get permission (if any is required) for tagging and coring trees. Background information about the minor impact of the coring on trees is available from Dr. Juday.

From this project we hope to learn the age and growth history of trees at local schools and other sites, the years of region-wide increases and decreases in tree growth, and the response of trees on different sites to recent changes in climate.