Where I Work

Environmental & Science Education, STEM, Global Change, Climate Change, Nature

Ed Hessler

Forest ecologist Paolo Cherubini is a dendrochronologist - tree-ring dating - who uses this skill and training to date stringed instruments, particularly when litigation is involved. This concerns questions of authenticity on when the instrument was made.

Writing about him for Nature Notes' series  Where I Work, Nic Fleming notes that "Dendrochronology cannot precisely date when an instrument was made, but it can identify the most recent year that the wood it was made from was part of a growing tree. Tree rings give probabilities and levels of confidence in a date according to the availability of appropriate reference series."

Cherubini uses "dendrochronology...to understand how trees grow, as well as to investigate historical environmental conditions. Th widths of tree rings vary according to meteorological conditions, so samples can be dated by cross-reference against databases of ring-width series." 

Cherubini is a senior scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Zurich, Switzerland.

What a great headline for the article: Timbre in the timber...