Search

Eighty one well-preserved wooden pillars were found аs a result of underwater archaeological excavations of a submerged prehistoric settlement in the estuary of Ropotamo River, Black Sea. That provokes a scientific interest to identify wood materials. The longest tree-ring chronologies have been used to build floating dendrochronology series. Anatomical features of xylem showed that 34 out of the 81 studied wooden pillars belong to genus Quercus. The remaining 47 pillars belong to a species of the genera Fraxinus, Acer, Ulmus and Platanus. It has been found that 8 out of 34 oak pillars have a length of tree-ring series over 30 years. This was the reason to select them for dendrochronological studies. The length of the built floating master chronology for the oaks is 84 years. The lack of strong coherent signal between 34 single oak dendrochronological series can be explained with three different types of oak forest ecosystems, in the area of the Ropotamo River estuary. These forest ecosystems are as follows: oak high stand forests in Strandzha Mountain, oak coppice forests on the Black Sea coast plains and riparian ‘Longoz’ forests of Ropotamo River. The tree-ring series of these forest types have different tree-ring signatures. Based on the tree-ring analysis it can be assumed that the timber of the above-mentioned three types of oak ecosystems was used in the construction of the prehistoric settlement.

The study focuses on the response to climate change of indigenous and introduced coniferous tree species – Austrian black pine (Pinus nigra Arn.) and Colorado spruce (Picea pungens Engelm.) situated in the urban city park “Prostor” in the town of Kardzhali. A multifactor regression analysis was used in the frame of the dendrochronological studies to establish the functional dependence “climate – radial growth”. The model was tested in a climate window with a segment of 16 years – from 2005 to 2020. The data for air temperature and monthly precipitation amounts for Hydro-meteorological station (HMS) Kardzhali were used as predictors for the radial growth. = Both species’s indifference to the temperatures and rainfalls during the months August and September, crucial for the ring formation, leads to the absence of significant growth depressions in tree-rings chronologies and justifies the good condition of the studied trees.