Modelling oak response to climate change and disturbance

Understanding woodland resilience to environmental change requires insights on longer timescales than is currently possible using standard management tools. In recent years, within Scotland, a good knowledge of the impact of past timber exploitation and climate change has been derived for Scots pine using dendrochronological methods. However, very little is known about the long-term impacts of climate, disturbance and management on Oak woodlands.

Scottish oak woodlands are strongly fragmented with wide ranging ecologies - from the wetter Atlantic realm where oak reaches its northernmost biogeographical limits, to the drier lands in the east, including both lowland and upland environments. Although many individual trees in these woodlands are likely 200-300-years in age, it is not known how they responded to the cooler conditions and periods of peak management in the 18th-19th centuries.

It is also unclear how oak trees growing in very different ecological situations may fare in the coming decades.

This project, using a spatial network of Oak woodlands, aims to undertake a range of dendrochronological analyses necessary to assess the response of oak trees (Q. robur and Q. petraea) to both current and past climate change and examine the influence of different management techniques on growth and resilience. This will enable us to better inform current management strategies for the different regions to increase woodland resilience in the decades to come.

Subsidiary aims of the project will also explore the potential of using Blue Intensity (an image analysis method to measure relative wood density) and stable oxygen isotopes measured from the latewood of oak tree-rings to improve historical dating as well as reconstructing past precipitation.