Abstract
This research evaluates the usefulness of oak earlywood vessel area as a climate proxy in the western United Kingdom (UK). The results demonstrate that at this site earlywood vessel area contains a different environmental signal (March relative humidity) to a ring-width chronology developed from the same trees. The vessel area signal passes commonly used verification statistics and was found to be representative of the climate of a similar geographic area to other tree-ring proxies, albeit with a lower explained variance. Taking the average of all the vessels identified for each year weakened the reconstructed climate signal and it was found for this study that the average of the 10 largest vessels provided the strongest and most stable match. The results demonstrate earlywood vessel area of oak in the UK has potential as a climate proxy, but that further work to strengthen and characterise the climatic target variable controlling vessel area is required.
Highlights
Climate proxies provide an approach to examine past changes in climate, and under favourable circumstances, these can be used to extend records back beyond the period of direct instrumental observa tions
The annual resolution is important in the study of the recent past, as it permits the study of extreme events and the application of statistical calibration, verification and measures of con fidence to be established (McCarroll and Loader, 2004)
For earlywood vessels to be useful as a proxy in the United Kingdom (UK) there are a number of conditions that should be met: 1) a strong shared common signal between constituent trees (Fonti and García-Gonzalez, 2008), 2) a better or unique environmental signal in comparison to easier to obtain tree-based proxies (Fonti and García-Gonzalez, 2004), 3) a climate signal that is representative of a large spatial area, and 4) the recon struction passes climate reconstruction verification statistics
Summary
Climate proxies provide an approach to examine past changes in climate, and under favourable circumstances, these can be used to extend records back beyond the period of direct instrumental observa tions. This provides a longer-term context within which to view recent anthropogenic impacts upon the climate system. Con straints (e.g. cost and time) have impeded the production of accurate measurements and well-replicated chronologies (Eckstein, 2004) Since the latter half of the twentieth century, and with the improvement of fully- and semi-automatic image analysis (e.g. CATS, Land et al, 2017; ImageJ, Schneider et al, (2012); ROXAS, von Arx and Carrer, 2014), there have been a number of investigations relating cell characteristics to environmental signals, especially the water-conducting tissues of conifers Since the latter half of the twentieth century, and with the improvement of fully- and semi-automatic image analysis (e.g. CATS, Land et al, 2017; ImageJ, Schneider et al, (2012); ROXAS, von Arx and Carrer, 2014), there have been a number of investigations relating cell characteristics to environmental signals, especially the water-conducting tissues of conifers (e.g. Belokopytova et al, 2019; Fonti and Babushkina, 2016)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
