If a Tree Falls into a River, Where Will It End Up? A Simulation Study on Identifying the Origin of Driftwood

• Activity Number: 254
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Jessica Chapman*+
• Companies: St. Lawrence University
• Keywords: Simulation Study ; Dendrochronology ; Time Series

Abstract

Identifying the origin of driftwood poses an interesting statistical problem: can chronologies of yearly growth from driftwood logs be compared to similar chronologies from living trees to find a plausible point of origin? However straightforward the question may sound, studies attempting to identify the source of driftwood are rarely done in the field of dendrochronology. Some of the complexities of this type of study include uncertainty about the year that the driftwood trees started/stopped growing, differing lengths of chronologies, and having living chronologies from a very limited number of sources. To understand the impact of some of these factors, we use data from the International Tree Ring Databank to conduct a simulation study to investigate the performance of the methods recommended in the dendrochronology literature as well as applying methods commonly used in statistical research.