Steve Voelker

Really cool paper integrating lead pollution within human hair led by Thure Cerling.

20 years ago I took the U of Utah Stable isotope course w/ @kevin-e-mueller.bsky.social (among others) where some of us were grinding up hair or shooting teeth with a laser in Thure's lab to obtain isotopic values.

They are really cool looking fish. I grew up by Beaver Dam, WI, and would see hundreds and hundreds of bowfins in the spring in the Beaver Dam River, right in the city below the dam. Nobody fished for them because they were a "rough fish".

Nevermind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college:

Plant Taxonomy
Forest Harvesting Systems
Environmental Ethics
Psychology 101
Interior Architecture

How tree rings help scientists understand disruptive extreme solar storms A study published this week shows that how trees store and use radiocarbon left over from ancient solar storms can tell scientists a lot about these ancient storms and help them refine estimates of…

Scientists have long relied on tree rings to learn about solar storms.

A Tansley review published this week shows that trees don’t all record this carbon in the same way. Understanding those differences is key to interpreting Earth’s history of space weather.

www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

Share your comments on NCAR with NSF Tell NSF the future that you want for NCAR by 13 March

@agu.org has a tool to help you submit a comment to NSF on the importance of NCAR: agu.quorum.us/campaign/154...

#SaveNCAR

I should have mentioned that you and Neil are the OGs of thinking about old trees based on Oldlist and Eastern oldlist!

Milwaukee, 2026

In angiosperms, species with the greatest longevity tended to occur in humid conditions, which were associated with greater maximum tree height and slower growth through intense competition. Angiosperm longevity was also more influenced by wood density.

The main finding is that longevity large matches "adversity begets longevity" in conifers so that dry or cold conditions were more associated with longevity (with a few major exceptions like coast redwood or Fitzroya, for ex.) whereas it is more complicated for angiosperms.

This paper has been in the works since Roel and Neil and I talked about it during the 2016 Ameridendro conference.

It took years for Roel and the team to gather a dataset large enough to robustly evaluate various competing hypotheses for controls on longevity.

For many of us dendrochronologists, controls on tree age has long been a fascinating topic. For at least 70 years it was widely known that "adversity begets longevity" (Schulman 1954, Science 119: 396-399).

However, many of us have also speculated that controls on longevity is more complicated.

Contrasting pathways to tree longevity in gymnosperms and angiosperms - Nature Communications Tree longevity is thought to increase in harsh environments, but global evidence of drivers is lacking. Here, the authors find two different pathways for tree longevity: slow growth in resource limite...

Led by Roel Brienen, our paper in @natcomms.nature.com "Contrasting pathways to tree longevity in gymnosperms and angiosperms" is finally out and formatted.

Other bluesky folks contributing to the paper were @yellowbuckeye.bsky.social and @rmtrr.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Paleoclimate pattern effects help constrain climate sensitivity and 21st-century warming | PNAS Paleoclimates provide examples of past climate change that inform estimates of modern warming from greenhouse-gas emissions, known as Earth’s clima...

Really excited to see this paper out!! Led by @vtcoop.bsky.social we show that if you use cold and warm paleoclimates together, you can reduce uncertainty in Earth's climate sensitivity by quantifying the pattern effect and more precisely constrain future climate change www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.

Train Dreams, shot in the PNW and an adaptation of Idaho writer Denis Johnson's novel, received four Oscar nods. In @highcountrynews.org today: how the film was seen through the eyes of a modern logging crew laborer.

Last October, on a hunch I checked out this undeveloped lake on industrial timberland in the UP.

It is mostly surrounded by ~200 to >250 year old white pines and hemlocks. There were many ducks, fish and a pair of swans that day.

The foresters/loggers have been keeping this one a secret.

I will have to tell my students this one.

Is it just a vulnerable site or location? Is that all we have?

With the risk of exposing my naivete -- is there a succinct catch-all term that is the opposite of refugium/refugia (in this case I am thinking about plant species)?

Massive update to the Global Wood Density Database out today @newphyt.bsky.social led by the brilliant Fabian Fischer. What an amazing community resource!
🧪🍁🌐

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I don't understand why this is not on American television. I have seen clips of this over recent years (cutting things in half) and it is compelling. It makes me think I could be a world champion. If this concept could somehow be merged with Family Feud...

Don't punch down. This person does not need extra steps -- have you talked to delivery workers? Yes, they sometimes cut corners like all people who do physical labor.

🍁Funding for new PhD students ($40k/yr) & postdocs ($70k/yr) coming from outside Canada. Contact me if interested in #Ecophysiology at #UBC in #Vancouver! Possible topics: leaf physiology, thermal ecology, microclimate, scaling, tree physiology, forest ecology, more! michaletzlab.org
Please share!

I remember that cold snap! My cousin and I went rabbit hunting in southern WI. My dad tried to tell us that we were crazy and to stay inside but we were headstrong 17 year-olds with something to prove.

A wood bowl held upside down to show the cross-sectional face of the wood displaying many tree-rings. The pith and light brown heartwood are near the lip of the bowl at the bottom/center of the image. Lighter colored sapwood constitutes most of the outer sides of the bowl. A crack with dark brown/black mineral stain proceeds from the pith outwards toward the edge of the indicates it was there when the tree was alive, and at this northern edge of the species range could likely be a "frost crack". Which can cause radial cracks to form in sugar maples during extremely cold winter temperatures.

At a local arts and crafts fair before Xmas I saw this bowl and immediately grabbed it and looked over my shoulder in case Frank Costanza was about to rain blows down upon me.

For this #Tree-RingTuesday here is a sugar maple bowl that has over 125 tree-rings.

I have often seen distribution maps of bur oaks extending north to their far northern edge near Winnipeg but I have never travelled there so it is nice to see some real trees from that area.

PhD Position: Tree Physiological Responses to Atmospheric Drought We invite applications for a fully funded four-year PhD position at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, with a planned start date in June 2026. The selected candidate wil...

🌳PhD Opportunity in plant ecophysiology🌡️ Join EPFL (Switzerland) for fully-funded 4yr PhD on tree responses to air drought and heat. Climate chamber + long-term experiments to uncover physiological thresholds under climate change. www.epfl.ch/labs/perl/pe...

At our house the small and expensive bags of dried mango from the co-op get carefully meted out in packed school lunches. I can imagine there could be chaos set off among children by a perceived endless supply from costco.

Yes, forest trees die of old age. But the warming climate is killing them faster The warming climate is killing Australia’s forest trees at a faster rate. This offers a glimpse of what may lie ahead for forests globally.

'Yes, forest trees die of old age. But the warming climate is killing them faster' #ClimateEmergency #Globalwarming #trees #eucalypts #plantscience #ecology 🪴🌳🌾🌱🌡️ theconversation.com/yes-forest-t...

Complaints can be filed with farmers about how diverse their crop fields are.