The Tree Of Life

Palm Springs Tree

BACKGROUND
We were given two pictures of tree stumps (one of a Georgia Pine and the other of a Palm Springs tree) are were required to count the rings and try to determine how old the trees were. By counting the rings, I found the Georgia Pine to be about 63 years old, and I found the Palm Springs tree to be about 34 years old.  

Georgia Pine

DATA

We also had to measure the width of each of the rings. I measured the rings using photoshop's ruler guide. (I made sure the image was in inches, not pixels.) We also had to find the average temperature and precipitation of the area each tree was found in. For the average temperature and precipitation, I used the June, July and August Months. I used the data from the regional climate center's website. The following table shows the data that I collected from these methods.

I used this data to create graphs that showed the average precipitation and width of the rings and another that showed average temperature and the width of the rings.

We can conclude from the graph above that Georgia receives more rain, but that does not necessarily mean that the tree rings are bigger than the Palm Springs tree. The two groups of data points are centered around the same width measurements, therefore I would not conclude that the amount of rain is correlated to the width of the tree rings.

From this graph, we can see that Georgia and Palm Springs have different temperatures, but again like the precipitation, there are not drastic differences between the two trees tree ring widths. I would therefore conclude that the average temperature is not correlated to the width of the rings. 

WORLD EVENTS

We were also supposed to put major events on the picture of the tree. I borrowed these pictures from Jessica Byers because she did a fantastic job with them.

CONCLUSIONS

The two trees are different types and are from different environments so that could be why no correlations were found between the width of the rings and the precipitation and temperature. A different version of this lab could have been to take two trees of the same type in different parts of the country and see if temperature and precipitation affected the ring widths.