INSTRUCTOR: DR. HENRI D. GRISSINO-MAYER
Dendrochronology is one of the most versatile disciplines in the physical and cultural sciences. The science uses tree rings that are dated to their exact year
of formation to analyze the temporal and spatial patterns of processes in the physical and cultural sciences. The science takes advantage of the fact that trees are nature’s ultimate environmental monitoring stations. They are immobile, they assimilate events
in the environment, they have their own special language, and they can’t lie (although sometimes they make searching for the “truth” quite challenging). In this course, you’ll learn how to read the language of trees and how to use this information to learn
about past and present environmental processes that may shed light on your particular research questions. The content of the course will appeal to students studying topics in a broad spectrum of disciplines in the physical and cultural sciences, including
geography, ecology, earth science, forestry, and archaeology.
The course represents one of the few lab-based, upper-level courses we offer in the Department of Geography, with three 50-minute lectures and one 2-hour lab
per week (total 4 credit hours). The course provides training and background in skills that will prove valuable for your career choice after graduation, such as project design and implementation, geographic field sampling schemes, applied quantitative analyses,
scientific methodology, and enhanced writing instruction. The lectures begin with an introduction to the history of the field and culminates with lectures that cover the major areas to which dendrochronology is applied, including natural hazards investigations
and assessments (wildfires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanism), climate reconstructions, archaeological analyses and interpretations, and ecosystem disturbance history.
The weekly labs (12 total) provide hands-on experience with the dating of tree rings, which largely involves first training your “memory mapping” skills, though
we focus mainly on temporal scales in addition to spatial scales. Pattern recognition is everything in this field. If you’re good at or enjoy any activity that requires problem solving skills (video games, crossword puzzles, even forensic shows), then you
will enjoy this course! In fact, the root techniques of dendrochronology are much like those found in the forensic sciences–recognizing patterns in tree rings is not unlike recognizing DNA patterns, fingerprints, or evidence left at crime scenes where one
wishes to link one pattern (e.g., a tire print) with a reference pattern. That’s exactly what we do: take a pattern of tree rings from an area and match them against known reference patterns! The foundations of dendrochronology emphasize pattern matching,
and you ‘ll get a heavy dose of this in the lab portion of the course!
If you have any questions about the course, about my teaching philosophies, or about the labs and course content, feel free to contact Dr. Henri Grissino-Mayer
([log in to unmask]). I can even send you a sample syllabus! Teaching evaluations can be found on ratemyprofessors.com (4.6/5 in overall quality) while university evaluations for every course I have ever taught in the last 10 years can be found at the Tennessee
101 web site (https://webapps.dii.utk.edu/tn101online/).
Henri D. Grissino-Mayer
Department of Geography
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996
865.974.6029
http://web.utk.edu/~grissino