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We cordially invite to the Scientific Seminar hosted by the Centre for Climate Change Research,  Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (Poland) . The lecture entitled: ‘Stable isotopes in tree rings’  will be presented by Prof. Dr. Iain Roberston (short bio), Department of Geography, Swansea University, Wales, Great Britain. The lecture will be conducted in hybrid form: 1. Onsite: Room 371, Department of Meteorology and Climatology, NCU, Lwowska 1, Toruń, 2. MS Teams platform on 25th June 2025, 5 p.m. CEST (UTC +02:00).

Link to access the lecture: Click to join  

Talk description:

Although stable isotope mass spectrometry originated in the 1940s, the major technical breakthrough occurred in the mid-1980s with the integration of an elemental analyser to a stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer. This advancement significantly expanded the use of stable isotopes in the environmental sciences. It was found that variations in carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen isotopic ratios within tree rings reliably reflect environmental conditions during growth.  Today, the determination of stable isotopes in absolutely dated tree-ring chronologies is a widely accepted palaeoclimatic technique that avoids many of the detrending issues associated with other proxies. This talk will explore the development of the field and highlight its future potential, including recent studies on societal collapse.

Image credit: Fig. 1.1 Schematic representation of interplay between environmental factors and ecophysiology that produces tree-ring C-H-O isotope composition. Environment can influence the ecophysiological, biochemical, and physicochemical mechanisms responsible for producing the isotope composition and consequently isotope dendrochronology can be used to infer environment and ecological events affecting ecophysiology (e.g., insect outbreaks). Tree rings allow identification of changes through time, but if a network of sites is sampled, the tree-ring isotope results can also reveal changes in space (isoscapes). Source of the figure: Leavitt S. W., Roden J. 2022. Isotope Dendrochronology: Historical Perspective (in:) R. T. W. Siegwolf et al. (eds.), Stable Isotopes in Tree Rings, Tree Physiology 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92698-4_1 p. 3-20. This chapter and images are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License