Wooster researchers publish new study on how local arboretum trees adapt to a changing climate

A new peer-reviewed study published in Plants, People, Planet is shedding light on how deciduous conifer trees growing in northeast Ohio’s Secrest Arboretum are responding to a rapidly changing climate. Led by Shoolroy Chair of Natural Resources Gregory C. Wiles, the article, “Using dendroclimatic analysis of exotic deciduous conifers in an arboretum to document tree growth in response to climate change, Northeast Ohio, USA,” uses tree-ring science to understand how species from the southeast United States, Europe, and Asia have adapted to conditions far from their native environments.

The research team also included Wooster graduates Srushti Chaudari ’22 (geology); Wenshuo (Fred) Zhao ’23 (environmental geoscience), and Mazvita Chikomo ’22 (environmental geoscience); Meagan Pollock, Lewis M. and Marian Senter Nixon Professor in the Natural Sciences; geology technician Nick Wiesenberg; and geo-ecologist Benjamin Gaglioti, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Wiles, a glacial geologist and founder of the Wooster Tree Ring Lab, has spent much of his career studying how climate shapes landscapes. “Most of the work we do with the lab is actually in Alaska,” he explained. There, advancing glaciers toppled entire forests and buried the wood in ice and sediment, where it remained preserved for scientists to sample and analyze hundreds to thousands of years later. More locally, just a 10-minute drive from the College, The Secrest Arboretum, a living archive of global tree species planted more than a century ago as part of a statewide reforestation effort, located on the Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences Wooster Campus, has become a scientific resource as well in partnership with curator Jason Veil.

The new article is the fourth the Tree Ring Lab has published on the arboretum’s collection. This paper focuses on how specific deciduous conifers — cone-bearing trees that, unlike evergreens, seasonally shed their needle-like leaves — are adapting to climate change. The Wooster team chose to study these distinctive species, Wiles said, because they are underrepresented in research, with only “four or five studies around the world that have been done this way.”

Among the species examined are Siberian larch, European larch, dawn redwood, and bald cypress. Their histories tell of both resilience and vulnerability. Since being transplanted from the sub-Arctic tundra and the Alps in the first half of the twentieth century, the Siberian and European larches, Wiles explained, “are shifting their climate response” to northeast Ohio’s increasing temperatures and precipitation. Meanwhile, the dawn redwoods, once thought extinct until rediscovered in China in the 1940s, and the bald cypress, native to the swamps of the southeastern United States, have shown remarkable stability in Ohio’s increasingly wet climate, even withstanding tornadoes.

Dawn redwood trees dropping their needles in the fall at Secrest Arboretum in northeast Ohio.

The project has been a rich years-long training ground for students through various AMRE projects, Wooster’s Applied Methods and Research Experience program in which students apply classroom learning as business and organizational consultants. Chaudari and Zhao both conducted field work, extracting core samples from living trees at Secrest. During the pandemic, all three student coauthors analyzed decades of tree-ring and weather-station data while following social-distancing guidelines on campus. In addition to presenting their findings at professional conferences, the students learned field methods, programming, and statistical analysis, which prepared them for postgraduate work.

Chikomo, now a doctoral candidate studying how global wetlands respond to environmental change, appreciates how her research at Wooster gave her not just the scientific tools she still uses today at Rutgers but also a “formative experience” in problem-solving, collaboration, scientific exploration, and the ability to communicate the team’s findings to various audiences. “This project ignited my appreciation for experiential learning and for research as an active, applied process,” she said, “one that takes theory from the classroom and turns it into knowledge that meaningfully enhances our understanding of the world.”

Zhao recalls that when he first embarked on dendrochronology research with Wiles, he was unfamiliar with tree-ring science. “The only thing I had,” he said, “was the passion for science and an unharnessed willingness to learn new things.” But his years of AMRE projects at Wooster became an “invaluable experience,” he added, because it “opened my eyes to the broader world of paleoclimatology,” the field to which he’s devoted his graduate studies at the University of Oklahoma.

For Wiles, the arboretum is both a scientific resource for natural experiments and a window into the future. As Ohio becomes warmer and wetter, understanding which species can withstand changing climate conditions will be essential for long-term planning. “A tree is an investment of maybe 100 years. Which species are best adapted going forward?” he asks, noting that ongoing research by Wooster’s Tree Ring Lab will help to reveal the answer.

Posted in Faculty, News on January 30, 2026.