In this gee-whiz science and great outdoors piece, an expert in tree-ring research shares some of the details of what trees can tell us — and whether or not their rings can reveal their age.

The tree-ring lab’s Connie Woodhouse is a great observer of the Colorado River, carver of the Grand Canyon, irrigator of the Southwest, feeder of Los Angeles.

Tree-ring increment cores collected from bigcone Douglas fir trees growing on Mount Pinos in Southern California. Each growth ring is a couplet of light colored spring wood and dark colored ...

She pulled in detailed tree ring growth records of 12 individual evergreen trees growing throughout Arizona — six Pinus edulis, three Pinus ponderosa and three Pseudotsuga menziesii — that had ...

This tree formed a ring only a few cells thick. It survived that drought, and many more like it over the next 400 years. Recent years have brought scant precipitation.

By analyzing the rings of two long-lived tree species, Ponderosa pine and limber pine, “we found that climate data alone did a pretty poor job of predicting population growth. We needed to include ...