Last week, AMRE students, Kendra Devereux and Alexis Lanier, ventured out to Barnes Preserve in Wooster and The Wilderness Center located in Wilmot, Ohio.

The team collected cores from white and red oak trees at both locations to update their chronologies and analyze land use history of these areas.

Barnes Preserve is a 76-acre park known for its rejuvenating atmosphere, diverse wildlife, and accessible trails. The team focused on collecting samples from mature trees in order to create a new local chronology. The Tree Ring Lab hopes to return to Barnes Preserve and build upon this record in the future.

The Wilderness Center has an old growth forest named Sigrist Woods that the team was interested in sampling. From these cores they hoped to learn more about a recent storm that damaged and felled many trees in the area. They plan to look more closely at the cores to see if ring widths were affected by this event by either storm damage or loss of competition.

Preliminary results are showing that the trees from Sigrist are dating back to the late 1800’s. Stay tuned for more of their results!

Special thanks for Denny Jordan and Herb Broda for helping facilitate this research.