organize & send cores to Cameron Dow for analysis

[teixeirak]

@camerondow35 , I'm opening this issue to organize cores to send you. First step is to clarify what you want. You want chestnut and black oak cores, correct? Only co-dominant/ dominant trees? Cores from both live and dead trees?

We have some cores (cored live 2010-11 and dead 2016-17) already mounted, sanded, scanned, and measured (as described in Helcoski et al. 2019). Others (cored dead 2018-> ) are in some stage of processing: some mounted (maybe sanded), others not yet mounted. I need to organize an inventory of these. There are a lot -- probably more than you want to process. Please give me guidelines on what you'd like.

[camerondow35]

Thanks for opening this @teixeirak !

I believe we're thinking that a good # of cores to have for the decline portion of the study is 15 dead + 15 healthy. I would prefer only co-dominant/dominant trees if possible. If you have cores from dead black oak that you believe were a part of this recent mortality event i'd take some of those. Maybe up to 10 if you think we'll be able to find another 5 dead during our visit.

Will I be able to core living black oak when I visit later this summer? It might be ok to use the living cores from 2010-11, but if there was a departure in growth of declining trees post-2011 we'd be missing the healthy comparison which isn't ideal (but not the end of the world). We'll also want to check if any cores we want to use from that 2010-11 cohort have died since then.

Otherwise, I do think it'd be interesting to compare the general trends and climate sensitivity of chestnut oak at SCBI to the ones I have from Indiana, so 15 cores from any random codominant+ chestnut oak you have in that 2010-11 group would be great. Let's not worry about comparing dead trees to healthy in the case of the chestnut oak since there wasn't an obvious mortality event - just normal background mortality, right?

[teixeirak]

@camerondow35 , sorry for the slow response. I'm slowly working on this.

It's fine -- and in fact helpful -- to core some living black oaks (how many?), with the request that you share the ring width data. (I'll write you sometime fairly soon about a project involving these.)

I need to work on inventorying how many cores and dead oaks we have.

Regarding the chestnut oaks, correct that there's no notable increase in mortality. If you want to take some fresh cores, that would again be helpful.

[camerondow35]

@teixeirak No worries, there isn't a need to rush so it's fine to keep it as a lower priority.

How about I plan on coring 10 healthy black and chestnut oak when I visit, and you can mail me 5 of each from the 2010-2011 batch along with any dead black oak cores you have from the past couple years? 10 cores should give me more than enough post-2011 data for the black oak decline. Judging from my preliminary data, it seems like the real story might be trends along the entire chronology, not just what's after the initiation of decline (i'll share soon, it's pretty cool!).