Regional coherency of boreal forest growth defines Arctic driftwood provenancing ☆

Published Date
Dendrochronologia
September 2016, Vol.39:3–9, doi:10.1016/j.dendro.2015.12.010
Russian tree-ring research

Author 

• Lena Hellmann ^a,b,,
• Leonid Agafonov ^c
• Olga Churakova (Sidorova) ^d,e
• Elisabeth Düthorn ^f
• Ólafur Eggertsson ^g
• Jan Esper ^f
• Alexander V. Kirdyanov ^h
• Anastasia A. Knorre ⁱ
• Pavel Moiseev ^c
• Vladimir S. Myglan ^j
• Anatoly N. Nikolaev ^k,l
• Frederick Reinig ^a,b
• Fritz Schweingruber ^a
• Olga Solomina ^m
• Willy Tegel ⁿ
• Ulf Büntgen ^a,b,o

• aSwiss Federal Research Institute, WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland
• bOeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, Bern, Switzerland
• cInstitute of Plant and Animal Ecology UD RAS, Yekaterinburg, Russia
• dETH Zurich, Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, Zurich, Switzerland
• eDendrolab.ch, Bern University, Bern, Switzerland
• fJohannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany
• gIceland Forest Service, Reykjavik, Iceland
• hV.N Sukachev Institute of Forest SB RAS, Krasnoyarsk, Russia
• iStolby National Wildlife Nature Reserve, Krasnoyarsk, Russia
• jSiberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Russia
• kNorth-Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk, Russia
• lMelnikov Permafrost Institute, Yakutsk, Russia
• mInstitute of Geography, RAS, Moscow, Russia
• nInstitute for Forest Sciences IWW, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
• oGlobal Change Research Centre AS CR, Brno, Czech Republic

Received 9 June 2015. Revised 4 December 2015. Accepted 14 December 2015. Available online 11 January 2016. 

Abstract

Arctic driftwood represents a unique proxy archive at the interface of marine and terrestrial environments. Combined wood anatomical and dendrochronological analyses have been used to detect the origin of driftwood and may allow past timber floating activities, as well as past sea ice and ocean current dynamics to be reconstructed. However, the success of driftwood provenancing studies depends on the length, number, and quality of circumpolar boreal reference chronologies. Here, we introduce a Eurasian-wide high-latitude network of 286 ring width chronologies from the International Tree Ring Data Bank (ITRDB) and 160 additional sites comprising the three main boreal conifers Pinus, Larix, and Picea. We assess the correlation structure within the network to identify growth patterns in the catchment areas of large Eurasian rivers, the main driftwood deliverers. The occurrence of common growth patterns between and differing patterns within catchments indicates the importance of biogeographic zones for ring width formation and emphasizes the degree of spatial precision when provenancing. Reference chronologies covering millennial timescales are so far restricted to a few larch sites in Central and Eastern Siberia (eastern Taimyr, Yamal Peninsula and north-eastern Yakutia), as well as several pine sites in Scandinavia, where large rivers are missing though. The general good spatial coverage of tree-ring sites across northern Eurasia indicates the need for updating and extending existing chronologies rather than developing new sites.

Keywords

Driftwood

Arctic

Dendro-provenancing

Boreal

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• ☆
  This article is part of a special issue entitled “Russian tree-ring research”.

• ⁎ 
  Corresponding author.

© 2016 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

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