PINE research
These pages contain some information about the research we have produced through the PINE project. The information contained on these pages was first compiled for a public meeting held in the village of Nellim in Lapland in May 2004.
 

PINE people
 
The PINE consortium is comprised of researchers from nine universities and institutes throughout Europe. Our researchers come from Finland, Sweden, Britain, Germany, Slovenia and Switzerland.

 

  
 

Many of our consortium visited Lapland last year for the final meeting of our project. Several PINE scientists have also carried out research in Lapland.

 



Climate information from the Laanila forest


Trees store much more than just wood pulp!

By looking at the patterns in wide and narrow rings ,and the changes in wood chemistry from year to year, scientists can find out what the weather was like in the past. This gives information about how it might change again in the future. Scientists find out when it was warmer, colder, wetter or drier by looking at tree rings. Some scientists are so interested in the information we can get from the trees that they travel from all over Europe to sample tree rings from the forests of Lapland.

 
To find out what kind of climate information the trees contain, patterns in the rings are matched to recent weather data. The trees at Laanila store a record of summer temperatures in the past. These patterns are used to say what the weather was like in the past. You can see on the tree ring record below that summers were cooler from 1890 to 1920 and the summer of 1937 was extremely warm.

Small core samples or 'slices' from the tree are removed in the field. These samples show the rings from within the tree. Each ring stores information from one specific year. The outside ring is the youngest and the ring in the very centre of the tree is the oldest. Climate information is stored in the width of the ring, the density of the wood and the chemical composition of the wood.
 


Once the tree ring sample has been dried, sanded and polished. It can be studied in the laboratory.
 


Follow the links below to read about some of the other work carried out through PINE:
 
Predictions of changes in forest composition under different climate scenarios
 
PINE research as presented in poster form at Nellim, May 2005
Measuring annual height growth in trees (In Finnish and English)
Analysing local weather records (In English)
Investigating how trees grow with pining experiments (In Finnish and English)
Investigating past environmental changes with pollen analysis (In English)
 
Workshops with locall stakeholders
Pine public workshops(In English)
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