Current News:
Apparently, this project is the World’s Most Urgent Science Project.
In September 2014, we ended planned fieldwork. Dan is elbows deep in cores, but this week we begin data analysis starting with earlywood-latewood analyses.
Project Goals:
PalEON (the PaleoEcological Observatory Network) is an interdisciplinary team of paleoecologists, ecological statisticians, and ecosystem modelers. Our goal is to reconstruct forest composition, fire regime, and climate in forests across the northeastern US and Alaska over the past 2000 years and then use this to drive and validate terrestrial ecosystem models. We will develop a coherent spatiotemporal inference framework to quantify trends and extreme events in paleoecological and paleoclimatic time series. Variables such as forest composition, fire regime, and moisture balance will be inferred from corresponding paleoecological proxies, with rigorous estimates of uncertainty.
Publications
In Revision/Review/Submitted
Rollinson, C., M. Alexander, A. Dye, D. Moore, N. Pederson, and V. Trouet. In review. Understory trees are more climate sensitive than overstory trees in temperate mesic forests. Ecology.
* Heilman, Kelly, Valerie Trouet, Soumaya Belmecheri, Neil Pederson, Melissa Berke, and Jason McLachlan. In revision. Increased water use efficiency leads to decreased precipitation sensitivity, but high temperatures offset its benefits on tree growth.
* Zhang, Junzhou, M. Ross Alexander, Xiaohua Gou, Annie Deslauriers, Fen Zhang, and Neil Pederson. Submitted. A month of post growing season stem growth in response to extreme, late-season climatic events highlight the resiliency of trees. Annals of Forest Science.
Accepted
* Au, Tsun Fung, Justin Maxwell, Kimberly Novick, Scott Robeson, Scott Warner, Benjamin Lockwood, Richard Phillips, Grant Harley, F.W. Telewski, Matthew Therrell, and Neil Pederson. Accepted. Demographic shifts in eastern US forests increase the impact of late-season drought on forest growth. Ecography
Finzi, Adrien, Marc-André Giasson, Audrey Barker Plotkin, John Aber, Emery Boose, Eric Davidson, Michael Dietze, Aaron Ellison, Serita Frey, Trevor Keenan, Jerry Melillo, J. William Munger, Knute Nadelhoffer, David Orwig, Scott; Ollinger, Neil Pederson, Andrew Richardson, Kathleen Savage, Jianwu Tang, Jonathan Thompson, Christopher Williams, Steve Wofsy, Zaixing Zhou, and David Foster. Accepted. Carbon Budget of the Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Site: Pattern, Process and Response to Global Change. Ecological Monographs.
Published
Pederson, Neil, Caroline Leland, Daniel A. Bishop, Jessie K. Pearl, Kevin J. Anchukaitis, Tessa Mandra, Myvonwynn Hopton-Ahmed, and Dario Martin-Benito. 2020. A framework for determining population-level vulnerability to climate: evidence for growth hysteresis in Chamaecyparis thyoides along its contiguous latitudinal distribution. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, section Temperate and Boreal Forests doi: 10.3389/ffgc.2020.00039.
Dannenberg, Matthew, Conghe Song, Erika Wise, Neil Pederson, and Daniel Bishop. 2020. Delineating environmental stresses to primary production of U.S. forests from tree rings: Effects of climate seasonality, soil, and topography. Journal of Geophysical Research – Biogeosciences doi: 10.1029/2019JG005499
Andrews, Elicia, Pamela Snow, Clarisse Hart, and Neil Pederson. 2019. A window into a tree’s world. NSF Data Nugget.
Manzanedo, Rubén D. and Neil Pederson. 2019. Towards a more ecological dendroecology. Tree-Ring Research doi: 10.3959/TRR2019-1.
Alexander, M. Ross, Jessie K. Pearl, Daniel A. Bishop, Edward R. Cook, Kevin J. Anchukaitis, and Neil Pederson. 2019. The potential to strengthen temperature reconstructions in ecoregions with limited tree line using a multi-species approach. Quaternary Research doi: 10.1017/qua.2019.33
Helcoski, Ryan, Alan Tepley, Neil Pederson, Jennifer McGarvey, Victoria Meakem, Valentine Herrmann, Jonathan Thompson, Kristina Anderson-Teixeira. 2019. Growing season moisture drives inter-annual variation in woody productivity of a temperate deciduous forest. New Phytologist doi: 10.1111/nph.15906
Druckenbrod, D., D. Martin-Benito, D. Orwig, N. Pederson, B. Poulter, K. Renwick, and H.H. Shugart. 2019. Redefining temperate forest responses to climate and disturbance in the eastern United States: new insights at the mesoscale. Global Ecology and Biogeography doi: 10.1111/geb.12876
* Zhao, S., N. Pederson, L. D’Orangeville, J. HilleRisLambers, E. Boose, C. Penone, B. Bauer, Y. Jiang, and R. Manzanedo. 2018. The International Tree Ring Data Bank (ITRDB) revisited: Data availability and global ecological representativity. Journal of Biogeography 10.1111/jbi.13488 Revised ITRDB available here.
* Dye, A., M.R. Alexander, D.A. Bishop, D. Druckenbrod, N. Pederson, and A. Hessl. 2018. Size-growth asymmetry is not consistently related to productivity across an eastern U.S. temperate forest network. Oecologia doi: 10.1007/s00442-018-4318-9.
* Kannenberg, S.A., J.T. Maxwell, N. Pederson, L. D’Orangeville, D.L. Ficklin, and R.P. Phillips. 2018. Drought legacies are dependent on water table depth, wood anatomy, and drought timing across the eastern U.S. Ecology Letters doi: 10.1111/ele.13173.
* Trotsiuk, V., D. Druckenbrod, N. Pederson, D. Orwig, D. Bishop, A. Barker Plotkin, S. Fraver, and D. Martin-Benito. 2018. Testing the efficacy of tree-ring methods for detecting past disturbances. Forest Ecology and Management doi 10.1016/j.foreco2018.05.045.
D’Orangeville, L. J. Maxwell, D. Kneeshaw, N. Pederson, L. Duchesne, T. Logan, D. Houle, D. Arseneault, C.M. Beier, D.A. Bishop, D. Druckenbrod, S. Fraver, F. Girard, J. Halman, C. Hansen, J.L. Hart, H. Hartmann, M. Kaye, D. Leblanc, S. Manzoni, S. Rayback, C. Rollinson, R.P. Phillips. 2018. Atmospheric water demand and timing regulate temperate forest sensitivity to drought. Global Change Biology doi: 10.1111/gcb.14096
Pederson, N., A.B. Young, A.B. Stan, U. Ariya and D. Martin-Benito. 2017. Low-hanging DendroDynamic Fruits Regarding Disturbance in Temperate, Mesic Forests. In Dendroecology: Tree-ring Analyses Applied to Ecological Studies, M. Amoroso, L. Daniels, P. Baker, J. J. Camarero, Eds. (Springer). pp. 97-134.
Marlon, J.R., N. Pederson, C. Nolan, S. Goring, B. Shuman, R. Booth, P. J. Bartlein, M.A. Berke, M. Clifford, E. Cook, A. Dieffenbacher-Krall, A. Hessl, J.B. Hubeny, S.T. Jackson, J. Marsicek, J. McLachlan, C.J. Mock, D.J.P. Moore, J. Nichols, A. Robertson, K. Schaefer, V. Trouet, C. Umbanhowar, J.W. Williams, and Z. Yu. 2017. Paleoclimate of the northeastern United States during the past 3000 years. Climate of the Past, 10.5194/cp-13-1355-2017.
Montane, F., A. Fox, A. Arellano, N. MacBean, R. Alexander, A. Dye, D. Bishop, V. Trouet, F. Babst, A. Hessl, N. Pederson, P. Blanken, G. Bohrer, C. Gough, M. Litvak, K. Novick, R. Phillips, J. Wood, and D. Moore. 2017. Evaluating the effect of alternative carbon allocation schemes in a land surface model on carbon fluxes, pools and turnover in temperate forests. Geoscientific Model Development 10: 3499-3517, doi: 10.5194/gmd-10-3499-2017.
McLauchlan, K.K., L.M. Gerhart1, J.J. Battles, J.M. Craine, A. Elmore, P.E. Higuera, M.C. Mack, B.E. McNeil, D.M. Nelson, N. Pederson, and S.S. Perakis. 2017. Centennial-scale reductions in nitrogen availability in temperate forests of the United States. Scientific Reports doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-08170-z.
Rollinson, Christine, Y. Liu, A. Raiho, D. Moore, J. McLachlan, D. Bishop, A. Dye, J. Matthes, A. Hessl, T. Hickler, N. Pederson, B. Poulter, T. Quaife, K. Schaefer, J. Steinkamp, and M. Dietze. 2017. Emergent climate and CO2 sensitivities of net primary productivity in ecosystem models do not agree with empirical data. Global Change Biology .
* Dye, A., A. Barker Plotkin, D. Bishop, A. Hessl, N. Pederson, and B. Poulter. 2016. Comparing tree-ring and permanent plot estimates of aboveground woody production in three Eastern U.S. Forests. Ecosphere .
Bishop, D.A. and N. Pederson. 2015. Regional variation of transient precipitation and rainless day frequency across a subcontinental hydroclimate gradient. Journal of Extreme Events DOI 10.1142/S2345737615500074.
Tipton, J., M. Hooten, N. Pederson, M. Tingley, and D. Bishop. 2015. Reconstruction of late Holocene climate based on tree growth and mechanistic hierarchical models. Environmetrics DOI: 10.1002/env.2368.
* = student led research
Field Scenes
Adirondacks
Funded by the National Science Foundation 
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