A dendroecologist uses tree rings to reconstruct climate, disturbances (including human land use), and other factors that influence tree growth.
I’m good at seeing patterns, and then noticing things that don’t fit the pattern. The next most important talent—a gift, really—is curiosity. I always want to know more. And finally, humility. We can’t understand new things or very old ones if we think we already know everything.
I call my work “forensic ecology.” We use the records kept by trees through their growth to understand what happened in the past. For example, how does fire occurrence in the past relate to fire and climate in the present?
In my science, we get to use a lot of power tools. For example, we use chainsaws to cut sections from old logs and belt sanders to sand the sections finely. The most useful tool is the increment borer, like the one I am holding in my picture. It’s a very simple tool that enables us to take a pencil-sized core sample from a live tree without hurting the tree.
I have found six pieces of wood that are nearly 1000 years old in the Colorado Front Range. They looked like charred, gray pieces of log, half-buried in the dirt. At the lab I was able to cross-date them back to the early 1000 AD. That’s before the Aztec or Incan Empires! The climate was different then, and the trees recorded that.
When I was six years old, my parents took me to the Denver Museum of Natural History. In the entryway was the fully assembled skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The minute I saw that, I knew I had to be a scientist.
