About this item
What if the stories of trees and people are more closely linked than we ever imagined?Children around the world know that to tell how old a tree is, you count its rings. Few people, however, know that research into tree rings has also made amazing contributions to our understanding of Earth's climate history and its influences on human civilization over the past 2,000 years. In her captivating new book, Tree Story, Valerie Trouet reveals how the seemingly simple and relatively familiar concept of counting tree rings has inspired far-reaching scientific breakthroughs that illuminate the complex interactions between nature and people.Trouet, a leading tree-ring scientist, takes us out into the field, from remote African villages to radioactive Russian forests, offering readers an insider's look at tree-ring research, a discipline formally known as dendrochronology.
About the Author
Valerie Trouet is an Associate Professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. She received her PhD in Bioscience Engineering at the KULeuven in Belgium in 2004 and has worked at PennState University and at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL before moving to Tucson, AZ. Valerie has been a dendrochronologist for almost two decades and her research focuses on the climate of the past ~2,000 years and how it has influenced human systems and ecosystems. She has used tree rings to study hurricanes, snowpack, wildfire, and the jet stream. She has studied the influence of climate on historical events, such as the Fall of Rome, the Ottoman Crisis, and the Golden Age of Piracy. Her research has brought her to sub-Saharan Africa, Siberia, the Californian Sierra Nevada, and the Balkans, where she was part of a team that found the oldest-known (1,075 years!) living tree in Europe. She has published more than 60 scientific papers, is a University of Arizona Distinguished Scholar, and a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. Her research has been covered by the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, National Geographic, and NPR's Science Friday, amongst others. Valerie's first book, Tree Story, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in Spring 2020. The Dutch translation - Wat bomen ons vertellen - will be published by Lannoo in May 2020.
