Leon Vlieger at Inquisitive Biologist:
Six years ago, Belgian dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet blew me away with Tree Story, making it onto my year-end list with her account of research on tree rings. To be honest, I was not sure how she could top that book, and maybe she was not either. For her latest book, released autumn last year, she has thus taken on the role of editor to let her colleagues tell you first-hand of their research. In a nicely balanced collection of essays that features long-lived trees from around the globe, ten senior dendrochronologists provide ten different and sometimes personal answers to the question: “And what else can you learn from tree rings?”
Trouet limits her visible contribution to the introduction, where she lays down some of the basic concepts so the others do not have to. What are tree rings? How do you study them without cutting down a tree? And how do you combine tree-ring records from different trees to create chronologies that can stretch back millennia, allowing you to date trees and the wooden objects we construct from them? After this, she steps back to let her colleagues speak.
More here.
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