The Bibliography of Dendrochronology is an archive of printed documents relevant to tree‐ring research worldwide. It was compiled and claims to be constantly updated by Henri D. Grassino‐Mayer. He is based at the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee. The site contains 10,825 references dating back to 1737 and was last updated on 29 July 2006. The bibliography is the largest online listing of material relating to tree‐ring research and is based on a large reprint collection maintained at the University of Tennessee along with approximately 3,500 documents archived at the Swiss Federal Institute of Forest, Snow and Landscape Research. This organisation gave financial support to develop the Bibliography.
Dendrochronology is a scientific method which crosses many other disciplines such as wood anatomy, isotope analysis and chemistry. It is the study of climate changes and past events by comparing the successive annual growth rings of trees or old timber. In 1988 the International Tree‐Ring Data Bank created a discussion forum that thrives today and this resource helps contribute to the international collaboration within this community.
The home page has a clearly marked search box with three fields: author, year of publication and title. Another option is a full text search or there is an advanced search. It is very easy to navigate between the different search screens. The usual wild cards can be used and quotation marks to search for authors. Search results provide bibliographic details of articles with keywords and abstracts where available.
The web site also contains a Glossary of Dendrochronology, which is a searchable database of over 350 terms and definitions in a number of European languages and a species database. The species database contains over 1,000 plant species with names in Latin, English and other languages. A common name can be searched (or the Latin name); for example with oak 482 references were found. The five most cited tree species are Pinus sylvestris, Picea abies, Pseudotsuga menziesii, Pinus ponderosa and Albies alba.
References can be submitted via the web site by authors via an online form. The bibliography is adapted from a multilingual glossary (Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, 1995). It is meant primarily for students and researchers from different backgrounds who use dendrochronology in a wide range of contexts, e.g. archaeology, hydrology, forest ecology and climatology.
