Olive Tree-Ring Problematic Dating: A Comparative Analysis on Santorini (Greece)

Paolo Cherubini, Turi Humbel, Hans Beeckman, Holger Gärtner, David Mannes, Charlotte Pearson, Werner Schoch, Roberto Tognetti, Simcha Lev-Yadun

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

63 Scopus citations

Abstract

Olive trees are a classic component of Mediterranean environments and some of them are known historically to be very old. In order to evaluate the possibility to use olive tree-rings for dendrochronology, we examined by various methods the reliability of olive tree-rings identification. Dendrochronological analyses of olive trees growing on the Aegean island Santorini (Greece) show that the determination of the number of tree-rings is impossible because of intra-annual wood density fluctuations, variability in tree-ring boundary structure, and restriction of its cambial activity to shifting sectors of the circumference, causing the tree-ring sequences along radii of the same cross section to differ.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbere54730
JournalPloS one
Volume8
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 28 2013

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
  • General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
  • General

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