October | 2026 | The College of Wooster Tree Ring Lab

The College of Wooster Tree Ring Lab (WTRL) participated in Archaeology Day. It was a beautiful day exchanging views and data between archaeologists, historians, Wooster Earth Scientists and the public.

Li and Leo explain the extraction of local information from tree-ring in Wayne County that is relevance to the Settlement of Wayne County Ohio.

Local collectors, historians and Archaeologists from surrounding counties share their expertise.

Trees as witnesses was common theme and many of the participants grew up around the old growth on The College of Wooster campus as well as Cornerstone Elementary School campus, Browns Lake Bog, Barnes Preserve and Johnson Wood, all in Wayne County.Li worked with the younger participants assembling Tree Ring Lab necklaces (see lower right) and handing out stickers. Before the kids can get a necklace they needed to identify the species of the wood making up the necklace pendant. The log building in the background – the Naftzger cabin, has been dated using tree rings by the WTRL. Here is the report.

Nik shows the group a core from the oldest living tree in Ohio (so far discovered). It is chestnut oak from Stebbins Gulch, which is part of Holden Arboretum. He successfully identified his necklace as a

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Four Wooster undergraduate students traveled to the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver for three days of presentations, networking and learning. They reported on preliminary results of their Independent Study thesis work.
Cheyenne gears up for some lively conversation – she has taken on the task of comparing Northern and Southern Hemisphere coastal tree-ring records aiming to better understand the role of the ocean-atmosphere system in the Pacific that is symmetric across the tropics.

Adam is looking at the signal in old growth (>250 years old) forests across Ohio that “witnessed” European Settlement in the early 1800s. This is a timely study coinciding with 250 Anniversary of the Nation.
Anika is reporting on a discovery that Western Red Cedar have a winter signal in their ring-widths – explaining this is a big part of her work. She is the first to report on the first red cedar chronologies developed from Alaska. Another first for the Wooster Tree Ring Lab.
Anna has taken on a study of lake cores and the interval in time that coincides with Settlement and changes in diatom communities over the past few hundred years in two lakes in the Sierra Nevada, CA.
Anna shares an inside diatom

https://woostergeologists.scotblogs.wooster.edu

The College of Wooster Tree Ring Lab

Monthly Archives: October 2026

The Wooster Tree Ring Lab and Archaeology Day at the Wayne County Historical Society, Wooster Ohio

GSA2026 Denver – Student Work

Learning about environmental change from tree rings