ASSESSING THE DENDROCLIMATOLOGICAL POTENTIAL OF POLYLEPIS RODOLFO-VASQUEZII IN THE PERUVIAN ANDES

This study constitutes the first investigation into the radial growth of the newly described tropical tree species, Polylepis rodolfo-vasquezii. In the early wet season of 2017, a sample set of cores were extracted from a P. rodolfo-vasquezii montane forest in the Cordillera Huaytapallana region of the Peruvian Andes. Standard dendrochronological techniques were applied to the samples to produce a 77 year-long annually resolved chronology, from 1940 to 2016. To evaluate the relationship between climate and ring-width variation and to assess the potential of the P. rodolfo-vasquezii ring-widths to serve as a reliable climate proxy, response functions and simple and spatial correlation functions were computed. The dominant signal in the chronology was with wet season temperature and precipitation. This finding demonstrates that P. rodolfo-vasquezii is a new useful species for paleoclimatic studies, while also contributing a promising step forward for tropical dendrochronology. In the future, we will work towards calibrating regional models of hydroclimate variability further into the Late Holocene using older stands of P. rodolfo-vasquezii. Models as such are of great importance in glaciated regions of the Andes since they can provide future availability predictions, where water resources are becoming increasingly threatened by climate change.