English yew rings reconstruct 300 years of drought
Southern England yew trees track spring–summer rain and Palmer drought, capturing 1710–2020 wet and dry extremes across western Europe.
Source
<i>Taxus</i> tree-ring chronologies from southern England reveal western European hydroclimate changes over the past three centuries
What they did
From 186 trees at 22 sites the authors built a 153-sample Taxus ring-width chronology (1710–2020), correlated residual and standard series with CRU precipitation and scPDSI, and scaled reconstructions with bootstrap uncertainties.
What they found
The residual chronology correlates 0.70 with April–July precipitation; the standard chronology 0.59 with July scPDSI (1901–2020). Reconstructed AMJJ rain ranges 65–330 mm (mean 205 mm). Nine shared drought years include 1740, 1921, 1976, and 2018. Dry decades cluster in the 1720s–1750s and 1910s–1950s; wetter conditions dominate from the 1970s.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Replication is only six cores in 1710–1725. Correlations weaken east of Germany. Yew is still rare in dendroclimate networks, so spatial coverage is England-centred. Death-toll context in the introduction is not a climate result.
Key terms
- Tree-ring width (TRW)
- Annual radial growth, here of yew (Taxus), used as a hydroclimate proxy.
- scPDSI
- Self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index, a soil-moisture drought metric.
- Expressed population signal (EPS)
- A replication statistic; values above 0.85 mean the chronology well represents the site signal.
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Common questions
Why yew instead of oak?
Yew is long-lived and underused (only 13 prior dendroclimate studies); this network fills a western European hydroclimate gap.
Is 2018 unusual in the 300-year record?
It is one of nine shared extremes below −1.8 SD in both precipitation and scPDSI reconstructions.
How far does the signal reach?
Correlations >0.6 over southern England and northwest France, fading to ~0.2 in the Alps and Poland.
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