Spent a couple of days this past week with some dendro folks from USM and Indiana coring trees in the bottomlands near Yazoo City , Mississippi. We were looking for more evidence of flooding on the lower Mississippi River. The weather was near perfect and we made a nice collection of overcup oak and saw the largest and oldest looking sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua I)’ve ever seen.
Really proud of this article that my former grad student Emma Bialecki and I recently published. This work developed out of Emma’s masters research at Big Oak Tree State Park in southern Missouri. It is the first publication to report using flood rings in bottomland hardwoods to develop long flood history records for the Mississippi River. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.11.005
Read More from A multi-century tree-ring record of spring flooding on the Mississippi River
I was lucky enough to return to Cuba in July to attend a conference that I was invited to by some Cuban colleagues, and this time I actually got to go into the field to try to find some tree-ring samples. We went to a region called Pinar del Rio, specifically to an area called Viñales. This place is quite picturesque because of the Karst topography.
If you have never been to Dauphin Island, Alabama, it is a very cool place. I had not been there since the late ’80s (except to fish nearby) and had forgotten how cool it is. the Audubon bird sanctuary is especially cool. During the spring and fall migrations it boasts some of the highest bird diversity in North America. Check out some more pics https://goo.gl/photos/QW9aTz4Fap9m81Dn9
One of the cool projects that I have worked on since moving back to Alabama focuses on using tree rings to date the construction of a group of historical log buildings. I was asked by the AL Office of Archaeological Research to attempt to determine the construction history of three log buildings that were once a part of Snow Hill Plantation and are currently located at Noccalula Falls State Park and Little River Canyon Center. There was some speculation that […]
Got to go to Cuba as part of the University of Alabama Cuba Center. As you might imagine it was a very interesting trip. I was there to to check out the potential for doing tree-ring studies on the island. Unfortunately I did not get to make any collections but I did get to visit several natural areas both near Havana, and farther along the northern coast in the state of Matanzas. As usual when I have traveled I found the […]
Met up with fellow dendro folks Grant Harley from Southern Miss and Clay Tucker from LSU (and others) to core bald cypress on the lower Pascagoula River to study streamflow. We also found a lot of nice overcup oak.
Went down to Bruce, Florida with Civil Eng. colleague G. Tootle as well as a great group of Environmental Science and CE students to core bald cypress trees to support a reconstruction of Choctawhatchee River streamflow. We were updating an earlier collection by D. Stahle as well as collecting some fantastic subfossil samples some of which may be thousands of years old. We have a nascent web site devoted to the project here http://choctawhatcheerivertreeringstudy.weebly.com/