Ohio Today Online Departments Across the College Green

Old oak tells region’s climate history

It stood about 150 feet tall with a circumference as large as four people across. It saw more changes in its lifetime than any human can imagine. It survived fires, droughts, flooding and high winds. But the 373-year-old white oak couldn’t withstand the strength of a 1998 storm that felled what researchers now know was the oldest recorded hardwood east of the Mississippi River.

But while this discovery is exciting to Ohio University researchers, they are even more interested in what the tree can tell them about the region’s climate and ecology over nearly four centuries.

The region’s oldest oak is one of 10 under scrutiny by environmental and plant biologists conducting research in Dysart Woods, a University land laboratory in southeastern Ohio. The studies have allowed researchers to fill in gaps in the climate history of the region, which has been accurately recorded only since 1950.

“Studying the tree allows us to reconstruct fairly clearly what’s been happening over the past 400 years,” says Brian McCarthy, an Ohio University associate professor of environmental and plant biology. “We can determine, for example, that there were droughts in the 1600s, which might have had a big influence on Native Americans or the early settlers in the late 1700s.”

McCarthy believes there are many trees in Dysart Woods that may be even older than the one in his latest study. Research on this old-growth forest is continuing, and McCarthy says it could lead to a clearer picture of past and future climate conditions.

— Meghan Holohan