Current Issues and Recent Advances in Australian Dendrochronology: Where to Next?

Abstract

Trees and shrubs constitute one of the most widely distributed terrestrial stores of environmental information. To date, dendrochronological exploitation of information stored in Australian plants has mostly relied on development and analysis of cross-dated ring-width chronologies or ring/growth zone counts. Thus far, however, ring-width chronologies have only been produced from sites in the relatively seasonal climates of southeastern and southwestern Australia and the far north. These chronologies have been developed almost exclusively for climatic analyses. Ring or growth zone counts have provided invaluable environmental information but can also be somewhat limited. We argue that evoluti..