Description: Climate reconstructions using stable isotopes from tree-rings are steadily increasing. The investigations concentrate mostly on cellulose due to its high stability. In recent years the available amount of cellulose has steadily decreased, mainly because micro-structures of plant material have had to be analyzed. Today, the amounts of cellulose being studied are frequently in the milligram and often in the microgram range. Consequently, homogeneity problems with regard to the stable isotopes of carbon and oxygen from cellulose have occurred and these have called for new methods in the preparation of cellulose for reliable isotope analyses. Three different methods were tested for preparing isotopically homogenous cellulose, namely mechanical grinding, freezing by liquid nitrogen with subsequent milling and ultrasonic breaking of cellulose fibres. The best precision of isotope data was achieved by freeze-milling and ultrasonic breaking. However, equipment for freeze-milling is expensive and the procedure is labour-intensive. Mechanical grinding resulted in a rather high loss of material and it is also labour-intensive. The use of ultrasound for breaking cellulose fibres proved to be the best method in terms of rapidity of sample throughput, avoidance of sample loss, precision of isotope results, ease of handling, and cost.

Description: δ13C and δ18O of tree rings contain time integrated information about the environmental conditions weighted by seasonal growth dynamics and are well established as sources of palaeoclimatic and ecophysiological data. Annually resolved isotope chronologies are frequently produced by pooling dated growth rings from several trees prior to the isotopic analyses. This procedure has the advantage of saving time and resources, but precludes from defining the isotopic error or statistical uncertainty related to the inter-tree variability. Up to now only a few studies have compared isotope series from pooled tree rings with isotopic measurements from individual trees. We tested whether or not the δ13C and the δ18O chronologies derived from pooled and from individual tree rings display significant differences at two locations from the Iberian Peninsula to assess advantages and constraints of both methodologies. The comparisons along the period 1900–2003 reveal a good agreement between pooled chronologies and the two mean master series which were created by averaging raw individual values (Mean) or by generating a mass calibrated mean (MassC). In most of the cases, pooled chronologies show high synchronicity with averaged individual samples at interannual scale but some differences also show up especially when comparing δ18O decadal to multi-decadal variations. Moreover, differences in the first order autocorrelation among individuals may be obscured by pooling strategies. The lack of replication of pooled chronologies prevents detection of a bias due to a higher mass contribution of one sample but uncertainties associated with the analytical process itself, as sample inhomogeneity, seems to account for the observed differences.

Description: Annual rings are generally not anatomically distinct in trees growing in the humid tropics. The possibility to use radial variation in stable isotopes (δ18O and δ13C) for the identification of annual rings in these trees was investigated in two species growing in the tropical rainforest of Central Guyana, Carapa guianensis and Goupia glabra. The climate is characterised by an annual precipitation of 2,700 mm that is distributed over two rainy and two dry seasons. Cores were taken from trees of measured diameter increment rates. High-resolution tangential sections in radial direction were dissected from these cores and isotopic ratios were measured on whole wood. Variation in δ13C was about 1‰ at an annual scale, whereas δ18O showed two to four times larger annual excursions. The minima in δ18O were selected as primary indicators of annual boundaries at the main wet season when also δ18O of precipitation water has its minimum. The minima in δ13C coincided often with these. The simultaneous occurrence is consistent with increased discrimination against 13C at high water availability. They were used as secondary criteria. Annual rings could thus be identified with reasonable certainty in both species from radial variation in isotopic ratios as verified with measured diameter increment rates. The short sequence covered in the analysis did not show clear correlation with the available precipitation data for the area. The method supplemented with other dating methods may prove to be practically useful for identifying annual rings and applying classical dendrochronology when more cost effective automatic sampling devices become available.

Description: Recent warming in High Asia might have a strong impact on Asian summer monsoon variability with consequences for the hydrological cycle. Based on correlations between climate data, the tree‐ring δ18O of high‐elevation junipers is an indicator of August precipitation. Thus, our 800‐year long annually resolved oxygen isotope series reflects long‐term variations in summer monsoon activity on the southern Tibetan plateau. Summer precipitation was reduced during 13th–15th centuries and since the 19th century, whereas the Little Ice Age period (15th–19th century) was rather moist. The late 20th century was among the driest periods during the past 800 years, showing a tendency to slightly wetter conditions after AD 1990.

Description: Twentieth-century warming could lead to increases in the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere, altering the hydrological cycle and the characteristics of precipitation. Such changes in the global rate and distribution of precipitation may have a greater direct effect on human well-being and ecosystem dynamics than changes in temperature itself. Despite the co-variability of both of these climate variables, attention in long-term climate reconstruction has mainly concentrated on temperature changes. Here we present an annually resolved oxygen isotope record from tree-rings, providing a millennial-scale reconstruction of precipitation variability in the high mountains of northern Pakistan. The climatic signal originates mainly from winter precipitation, and is robust over ecologically different sites. Centennial-scale variations reveal dry conditions at the beginning of the past millennium and through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with precipitation increasing during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries to yield the wettest conditions of the past 1,000 years. Comparison with other long-term precipitation reconstructions indicates a large-scale intensification of the hydrological cycle coincident with the onset of industrialization and global warming, and the unprecedented amplitude argues for a human role.

Description: Detecting and extracting the dominant climatic signal from tree-ring records derived from Mediterranean areas remains challenging because the relation between climate and tree-growth are usually characterized by a complex interplay of temperature and precipitation signals, with high spatial and temporal variability. Although several studies have established climate−growth relationships in old forests on the Iberian Peninsula (IP), a reliable calibration level between tree-ring data and the instrumental records making possible the inference of past climate has not yet been established, mainly due to low correlation coefficients (i.e. r ≤ 0.4) and/or instability over time of the climate−growth relationships. We tested for spatial significance and temporal stability of climatic signals in a collection of tree-ring proxies at the Cazorla Range (NCZ), located in the southeast of the IP. The aim was to identify suitable proxies for further use in climate reconstructions. The tree-ring variables under investigation included tree-ring width (TRW), latewood width (LWw), maximum latewood density (MXD) and stable carbon (δ13C) and oxygen (δ18O) isotopes. Our results show how the strength and temporal stability of the relationship between tree-ring proxies and selected seasonal climate variables largely depend on the climate data used. Moreover, imprecise identification of the climate signal may lead to erroneous evaluations of temporal stability. Overall, from the set of proxies measured at NCZ, TRW is suitable to reconstruct summer to autumn temperature while δ13C can potentially be used as a proxy for summer precipitation reconstructions. The calibration−verification trials using both regression and scaling techniques revealed how scaling retains more inter-annual variability but decreases the values of the reduction of error (RE).

Description: In the eastern Mediterranean in general and in Turkey in particular, temperature reconstructions based on tree rings have not been achieved so far. Furthermore, centennial-long chronologies of stable isotopes are generally also missing. Recent studies have identified the tree species Juniperus excelsa as one of the most promising tree species in Turkey for developing long climate sensitive stable carbon isotope chronologies because this species is long-living and thus has the ability to capture low-frequency climate signals. We were able to develop a statistically robust, precisely dated and annually resolved chronology back to AD 1125. We proved that variability of δ13C in tree rings of J. excelsa is mainly dependent on winter-to-spring temperatures (January–May). Low-frequency trends, which were associated with the medieval warm period and the little ice age, were identified in the winter-to-spring temperature reconstruction, however, the twentieth century warming trend found elsewhere could not be identified in our proxy record, nor was it found in the corresponding meteorological data used for our study. Comparisons with other northern-hemispherical proxy data showed that similar low-frequency signals are present until the beginning of the twentieth century when the other proxies derived from further north indicate a significant warming while the winter-to-spring temperature proxy from SW-Turkey does not. Correlation analyses including our temperature reconstruction and seven well-known climate indices suggest that various atmospheric oscillation patterns are capable of influencing the temperature variations in SW-Turkey.