News

Master project opportnity

Friday, January 6, 2012

• Today multi-century dendrochronological reconstructions have increased our understanding of past climate variability and set the 20th century warming and modelled future climate scenarios in a historical context. Much of the environmental variabiilty was attributed to dynamics of precipitation.  For example, precipitation over northern Europe increased by 10-40% during the 20th century.  Precipitation dynamics is inherently linked to the temporal and spatial patterns of drought events, which may heavily impact natural and agricultural ecosystems.
   
  The project, which will be a part of the bigger study aimed at reconstruction of precipitation dynamics in southern Fennoscandia, will provide a dendrochronological reconstruction of past precipitation and droughts at 2-3 sites in southern Sweden.
   
  The project will include field sampling (about a week), laboratory analyses (two to three weeks), analyses of the data, and writing of the final report (= your Master paper). During the course of the project a student will master a set of standard field and laboratory methods used in the dendrochronology, will learn statistical routines and software used in dendro research. Knowledge or interest in in geographical information systems (GIS) is an advantage.
   
• Read about other project ideas here (PDF file).

For further information contact Igor.Drobyshev(at)ess.slu.se