Can extant taxa give clues for paleoenvironmental reconstruction? Examples from diffuse and semi-ring-porous species.

Anais A Boura (1) , D de Franceschi (2)

1 CR2P - Centre de Recherche en Paléontologie - Paris
2 CR2P - Centre de recherche sur la Paléobiodiversité et les Paléoenvironnements

Wood is an excellent indicator of the tree growing environment. In most species, cambial activity is not constant throughout the year and anatomical structures, such as growth rings, vessels or fibres characteristics, record, during their formation, environmental events. This study, at the interface of several disciplines, focuses on the analysis of the inter- and intra-specific wood anatomical variability and on the search for - climatic and environmental – markers recorded in the heart of the wood anatomical structure. Wood anatomical variability in ring-porous species has been successfully employed in the past few years to extract the climate (temperature, precipitation) and environmental signals from tree rings (flood, insect defoliation). However, very little is known about the ability of diffuse- and semi-ring-porous species to record environmental signals in their xylem cells. This study was therefore undertaken to characterize the wood anatomical response of diffuse-porous species Alnus glutinosa and of the semi-ring-porous Fagus sylvatica and Prunus avium. Wood anatomical response to environmental parameters was assessed through the analysis of wood anatomical differences of approximately 750 growth rings of the three species sampled along a geographic gradient from north Spain to north France and Czech Republic. Image analysis was used to measure diverse classical and original wood anatomical features as growth ring width, porosity index, mean vessel area... Despite the existence of numerous distortions as false rings and narrow rings expressing respectively dominated and senescent states of the sampled trees, statistical analyses allowed us, to propose meteorological and global climate “answer scenarios” for each of the studied species. These last results can be used in the future for the re-examination of fossil wood material, in an attempt of palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction.

Domaines: Botanique; Paléontologie; Biodiversité et Ecologie

Anais A Boura, D de Franceschi. Can extant taxa give clues for paleoenvironmental reconstruction? Examples from diffuse and semi-ring-porous species.. 12th annual Neclime meeting, Sep 2011, Bucarest, Romania. ⟨hal-03665592⟩