Meeting with Neil - vvandermeersch/climategrowthshifts GitHub Wiki

Meeting: Lizzie and Neil on 9 June 2026

Below are a selection of what Neil sent me after the meeting (the full notes are in ChatsNeilPederson)

The common high frequency growth variation that is hard to explain, but fascinating. I love that.

This doesn’t help understand that, but it seems you need a random ‘genetic’ factor/model, too.

We are limited in what we know and understand and what we can grasp (by our brains, culture, and technology). Plant phys people have their devices to get at small scales, but are limited by the phase of tree growth, scale of tree growth, and replication of trees.

At the other end, us dendro people, do not have mechanisms, are working on phenomenon, but have decent replication, deeper time, and a large scale of tree growth (we don’t know shit about roots, leaves, LAI, and on).

I cannot help but come back to the five blind people touching an elephant and describing what they are seeing.

The tree scale trend, annual variability, and idiosyncratic events are kind of Ed’s tree growth model from his dissertation.

However, you are trying to understand the variability instead of giving it a haircut to reconstruct past drought.

He made a monumental leap with those haircuts, which led to drought atlases.

Trees are not carbon machines. They are beings just trying to survive and thrive.

This is the paper I am on that I thought of:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08634-y

This figure is gross to a lot of people:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08634-y/figures/3

But, isotopes match up with modeled estimates of NPP that include a water component:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08634-y/figures/3

I suspect at large scales the curves in those figures represent above ground carbon sequestration. Ed argues that the drought atlas does that. I’m one of his students, so I am contaminated that way.

I see excursions on this hypothetical carbon series due to disturbance (of all kinds) and local conditions and interactions. At larger scales over decades it would vary within a narrow band depending on trends in what helps grow trees (water, temp, VPD, nutrients from human sources).

Could be coincidental, but over ~25 years? I suppose still possibly concidence

... I’m also fascinated by the low frequency growth trend you were plopping out. You could take populations, like the data I have that were run over by a hurricane and the ones at Palmaghatt that have observed, though not precisely measured events/shocks and see how the low frequency trend for each tree maps out.

You’d have to go further back in time…it is fascinating that with better climate data, the soil moisture, you are hitting this conundrum. Schrödinger's Tree

I’ve been strong infkuenced by Stephen Jackson’s paper here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1654-1103.2006.tb02478.x

And some papers I (Lizzie) pulled to look at based on chatting with Neil (he recommended Esper and Carrer):

Carrer_&_Urbinata_2004
Carrer_etal_2010
Esper_etal_2002 (Science)
Esper_etal_2016 (QuantSci)
Esper_&_Frank_2009

Neil asked me how our approach differs from Anderson-Teixeira so I looked up some articles, she is senior on the Dow 2022 paper know well and this just came out: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele.70291