Nicole Davi
William Paterson University of New Jersey, NJ·Earth & Environmental Science
Tree rings preserve a year-by-year record of past climate. Reading them can show how often extreme cold, drought and volcanic cooling struck in the past, and how those events affected people.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Social Science
- Topics
dendrochronology
tree rings
paleoclimatology
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Develop two 1,000-year records of wood anatomical traits, such as cell wall thickness, frost rings and blue rings, from Siberian larch and Siberian pine in Mongolia to capture brief temperature extremes.
- Test the link between volcanic eruptions and cold extremes in Mongolia, and describe temperature variation over decades to centuries, from millennial-length wood anatomy records.
- Identify extreme climate events in northwestern North America during the Little Ice Age (about 1450–1850) from compiled tree-ring data, with emphasis on volcanic cooling.
- Compare tree-ring evidence with historical weather records and Indigenous ethnohistories of famine and migration to test how Arctic communities responded to extreme environmental change.
- Reconstruct the range of past climate variability so that public perceptions of water and water access can be placed in historical context, and to improve modeling of future rainfall and water access.
More about the research
The three projects use dendrochronology, the science of dating and analyzing tree rings, to reconstruct past climate in Mongolia, the North American Arctic and a region studied for water quality. They link these records to human experience, from herders' livelihoods to Indigenous histories and access to safe water.
Why it matters
Long climate records show how often extreme frost, cold and drought occur and how volcanic eruptions trigger them. This context could help Mongolian herding communities and Arctic Indigenous communities understand risks from changing extremes. Placing water access within long-term climate history may improve models of future rainfall and water availability, informing communities that depend on safe drinking water.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: Temperature Variability and Extremes at Multiple Temporal Scales in North Asia from Millennial-Length Wood Anatomical Records
NSF · Sep 2024 – Aug 2027
Collaborative Research: Socio-economic patterns, public perceptions, and climate vulnerabilities of water resources and quality
NSF · Dec 2021 – Nov 2026
Collaborative Research: Understanding the Impacts of Extreme Events on the Peoples of the Arctic
NSF · Oct 2021 – Sep 2026
Closest labs
Karen King
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Use quantitative wood anatomy, measurements of individual wood cells in tree rings, to build high-resolution temperature and precipitation records over the last millennium across temperate North America.
Jason Smerdon
Columbia University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Reconstruct wet-season rainfall over at least the last 200 years across the neotropics by measuring stable oxygen isotopes (δ18O) in tree-ring cellulose from Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile.
Diana Thatcher
Iowa State University, IA·Earth & Environmental Science
Reconstruct annually resolved, millennial-length northeast Pacific sea-surface temperatures from growth increments in shells of the Pacific geoduck, a long-lived marine clam.
The school
William Paterson University of New Jersey: 1 labs on PI Pages, 9 research doctorates a year.
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