Participants: Greg Wiles, Nick Wiesenberg, Ben Gaglioti, Daniel Mann, Gabrielle Sjoberg, Eloise Peabbles, Eric Benedict, Julian Narvaez, Bob Girt, Arianna Lapke, Lilly Hinkley, Amanda Flory, Michail Protopapadakis, Wenshuo Zhao, Tyrell Cooper, Lynnsey Delio, Isabel Held, Dexter Pakula, Landon Vaughan, Lev Sugerman-Brozan, and AYS students.
General: For the past five years faculty, staff, and students from The College of Wooster Tree Ring Lab, University of Alaska, Fairbanks and the Alaska Youth Stewards (AYS) from Kake, Hoonah, Angoon and Klawock in Southeast Alaska (SEAK) have been collaborating to understand environmental change through the collection of tree-ring data. Together, we sampled and processed eight tree-ring chronologies from a previously under-sampled region of SEAK. These data are records of past climate with direct linkages to cultural and land-use histories. The collection includes the first two western redcedar (Thuja plicata) series for Alaska, one from Kake based on the farthest known north stand of redcedar in its natural range and the other from Klawock. The remaining chronologies include three Alaska yellow cedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis) series from Kake, Hoonah and Klawock, a Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) series from Angoon, and two mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana) series from Hoonah and Angoon.
Background: The collaboration started remotely in the summer