ORIGINAL ARTICLEDrought signal in the tree rings of three conifer species from Northern Pakistan
Section snippets
Background
The northern region of Pakistan is mostly forested and the people living in the northern mountains depend on the trees for firewood and timber. This region is also the watershed for most of the major rivers of Pakistan, making the forests an important factor for stream health and water quality. Because of the high demand for timber since the administrative reformation in the 1970s and construction of the Karakorum highway, anthropogenic pressure has increased (Kreutzmann, 1991; Gohar, 2002).
Study site and sample collection
Pinus wallichiana (Blue pine), Picea smithiana (Himalayan Spruce), and Abies pindrow (West Himalayan fir) are native conifer tree species to the Himalayas. Pinus wallichiana is distributed from northeast Pakistan to Yunnan in southwest China, while Picea smithiana and Abies pindrow occur from northeast Afghanistan to central Nepal (Devkota, 2013). In the present study, we have collected tree-ring samples of Pinus wallichiana from Rama, Picea smithiana from Chaprot, and Abies pindrow from
Tree-ring width chronologies
We developed a 306-year (AD 1710–2015), a 538-year (AD 1478–2015), and a 610-year (AD 1406–2015) long tree-ring chronology from Abies pindrow, Picea smithiana, and Pinus wallichiana, respectively, at three different sites in Pakistan (Fig. 5). In the Shirial (Abies pindrow) sampling site twenty samples exceeded 200 years. The mean length of the series for Abies pindrow is 223 years. Likewise, the mean length for the series of Picea smithiana is 243 years from the Chaprot region with six samples
Conclusion
We developed three new chronologies of Abies pindrow, Picea smithiana, and Pinus wallichiana extending back 306-years (AD 1710–2015), 538-years (AD 1478–2015), and 610-years (AD 1406–2015), respectively, from three different sites of the Gilgit-Baltistan region of northern Pakistan. Tree core samples were only taken from living trees to build these chronologies. Considering that our Pinus wallichiana chronology was over 600 years in length, we believe that there is good potential for a
Declaration of Competing Interest
The author and co-authors have no conflict of interest or competing interests with this manuscript.
Acknowledgements
The Department of Earth and Environmental System at Indiana State University provided a graduate teaching assistantship for the first author. We would like to thank Indiana State University’s Research Committee for seed funding for this research work. We thank Hamim Munir, Javed Iqbal, and Muhammad Akbar for their work in the field. We would also like to thank to Dr. Connie Woodhouse, Dr. Karla Hansen-Speer, and two anonymous reviewers for their critical suggestion to improve this manuscript.
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