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diy dendrochronology (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/askscience

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I live in Vancouver Canada, my house was built in the 1950's and the basement has the floor joists of the kitchen [above it] exposed.

At that time forestry here was felling massive ancient trees. I'm curious how precisely I can establish a maximum age of the trees felled.

Obviously I could count the rings visible on the joists and subtract that number from 1950, but not having the tree's full diameter limits measurement. I understand it's possible to compare relative ring sizes with existing [cross referenced] data sets to date timber.

Does anyone have any experience doing this or able to point me in the right direction? Any resources I'm unlikely to find on Google?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I don't think you can determine maximum age if you don't have the last ring.

You could determine minimum age by assuming the tree is circular and the rings are regular. For timber trees, this is a fair assumption, because they chose straight trunks for long, straight timber.

Edit: maybe a process like carbon dating could give you an age at death. Carbon-14 dating only works for stuff at least 500 years old or so, and for trees you still need the outer rings, so that specific process wouldn't be useful here.

[–] evasive_chimpanzee 2 points 1 month ago

The first step, in my opinion, is to find any existing local-ish datasets. I reckon that around you, there could be trees that go back well over 1000 years to use as a reference. You could then try to find the oldest ring of the wood in your house. It's probably pretty hard to count back before that, but you could try to make estimates based on the circular ark of the grain pattern to determine a trunk diameter.

[–] Death_Equity 1 points 1 month ago

You would want to send out a sample and have professionals reference their data. I guess you could try and get their data(maybe a university researcher would be favorable) and do the cross referencing yourself, but dear God that would be tedious.