Collaborative Research: Advancing Our Understanding of Global Paleoclimate through the Expansion of African Dendrochronology

There are very few climate reconstructions from tree ring records from Africa as a whole, so there is a lack of knowledge about the nature of past climate variability to put current climate change in context. This project will use tree species from Zambia that have been shown to have promise for reconstruction of past climate. Samples will be collected by participants of annual field schools which train Zambian students and researchers in field, lab and data analysis techniques. The resulting data will be used to create a gridded precipitation reconstruction from the region, which will be analyzed to identify the primary drivers of climate variability. The Broader Impacts of the project is the capacity building and international collaboration associated with the annual field school. The goals of this project are measure radiocarbon, tree ring width and quantitative wood anatomy from the dominant tree species in Zambia to develop multi-century records. These data will be used to create a gridded reconstruction of precipitation from the region, and to identify primary climate drivers of climate variability. The project will evaluate correlations with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode, track the movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), and evaluate if and how the ITCZ extent and intensity has changed through time. The Broader Impacts of the project are to continue the African Dedrochronological Field School (ADF), which will also be the mechanism to collect samples from the study area. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.