© VICTOR CAETANO-ANDRADE
A towering Brazil nut tree in Jaú National Park in Brazil’s Amazonas state.
Evolving technologies hold the key to unlocking information
stored by ancient tropical trees, which have borne witness to human activities and environmental forces from pre-historic to industrial epochs.
"As trees grow, they absorb details about their surroundings into their wood, creating snapshots of the environment through time," says Victor Caetano-Andrade, from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
The insights that can be gleaned from these "time capsules of cultural heritage" could help inform conservation efforts, according to a
review published by Caetano-Andrade and colleagues in the journal
Trends in Plant Science.
This is a mounting imperative, they write, as tropical forests are refuges for half of the Earth's biodiversity and
major mitigators of greenhouse gases.
However, the trees face numerous threats from
climate change and logging; an area equivalent to 40 football fields is being
deforested every minute.
The review discusses bringing together dendrochronology (the study of tree rings), radiocarbon dating, stable isotope in the wood and tree DNA to shine more light on questions about past human societies.
"We emphasise the importance of using these methods in dialogue with history and archaeology to understand the dimensions of human influence in tropical forests," says Caetano-Andrade.
Rather than forests being "pristine" prior to industrialisation,
evidence from trees, archaeological and historical records suggest prehistoric humans had far greater impacts on their ecology than previously thought.
Comment: The Zeller-Nikolov climate discovery: Carbon dioxide has no measurable effect on planetary temperature
A very small selection of articles related to NOAA climate data tampering we have collected include: