Rob Wilson is a Professor in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of St Andrews. He is a tree-ring scientist – a Dendrochronologist. His research focusses on palaeoclimatology of the Common Era (last 2000 years) with specific emphasis on the use of tree-ring archives to understand the trends and drivers of climate change – past and present. He has been involved in local/regional studies in Europe, North/South America, SE Asia and Australasia and has led initiatives to understand large scale climate change at Hemispheric scales over the last millennium.

Rob’s tree-ring work in Scotland started in 2007 with the creation of the Scottish Pine Project which initially focused on the reconstruction of past summer temperatures over the last 1000+ years. Through this project, Rob has sampled most of the semi-natural living pinewoods across the Scottish Highlands as well as extracting preserved ancient pine material, going back 8000 years, from lochs and peat bogs from multiple locations across the Highlands. This data has enabled him to explore the impact of timber felling on pine woodlands over the last few centuries, improve approaches to tree-ring based archaeological dating across Scotland, as well as quantify the impact of climate change on these forest ecosystems.

Despite Scots Pine being an incredibility resilient species that grows across a large range of environments within Europe -within the Scottish context, Rob’s recent work suggests that the western pinewoods of Scotland may be showing signs of an anomalous reduction in productivity (i.e. slower growth rates).

Although to use the word “decline” would be premature, the so-called “pine decline” of the mid-Holocene (4400-6500 years BP) is well documented and highlights the potential sensitivity of Scots Pine to significant environmental change. Rob’s research has now therefore shifted towards modelling this recent phenomenon to better understand the drivers of this change in growth.

Only through a better understanding of the drivers of such growth changes, can we create management strategies to ensure the continuation of the Scottish Pinewoods in the future.