Tree Rings and Climate

This classic title, originally printed in 1976, contains a lucid description and summary of basic dendrochronology, especially its application to climatic reconstructions that are now a highly valued and objective tool for putting future climatic changes in perspective with past climatic history for up to several thousand years. The book's author, Professor Harold Fritts, has been a leader and pioneer in dendrochronology, dendroclimatology and modeling the tree growth environmental response system for 35 years. He has over 100 publications including three books. Tree Rings and Climate was his second book, which was written for the non-botanist and non-statistician who wish to understand the principles governing tree ring formation and their analysis to reveal past history, climate and dating of past events. The basic botanical processes governing tree ring formation are covered in Chapters 1-5. Chapter 6 deals with some of the simple statistics and what they reveal about the tree response to environmental and physiological variables. This includes a very basic discussion of matrix algebra, eigenvectors and principal components as used in the early works of tree ring analysis. The last three chapters deal with calibration, interpretation, reconstruction and verification or climate reconstructions from tree-ring data. An appendix is included of scientific and common names of trees, bibliography to the pre-1976 literature, a glossary of terms, an author index and a subject index. Professor Fritts has captured and described the basic principles of the field in a way that has not lost value in the ensuing 25 years. Tree Rings and Climate remains the basic primer of the field in spite of the exponential growth of dendrochronology and its expansion and application to a wide variety of disciplines in the last 25 years. "Despite its age, this remains a must-have volume for anyone who wants a good grounding in the subject, at a reasonable price, which means it can be bought by students, and should certainly be in those university libraries that do not already have a well-thumbed copy." Journal of Quaternary Science (2004) 19, 99 - 100