Paleoclimate
English yew rings reconstruct 300 years of drought
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Southern England yew trees track spring–summer rain and Palmer drought, capturing 1710–2020 wet and dry extremes across western Europe.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
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