Old‐age pine trees: Unique objects of the Buzuluksky forest

Tree‐rings contain information about variability of climatic factors and about various negative events (abnormal weather events, fires, defoliation caused by leaf‐eating insects, etc.). Due to the fact that information about climatic conditions and negative events, as a rule, covers short time intervals, the study of tree‐rings makes it possible to obtain data on both the climate and the dates of negative phenomena and also the degree of their impact on ecosystems over long time intervals. Old‐age trees are of particular value, since they allow obtaining information about variability of environmental conditions and negative events over hundreds of years. During our research in the Buzuluk Pine Forest in the national park of the same name, special attention was paid to identifying old Scots Pine trees ( Pinus sylvestris L.). The difficulty in studying the old tree growth dynamics was that in many of the trees the wood in the central part of the trunks had either decayed with the formation of hollows or contained areas of rot, which resulted in the inability to take samples that contained all tree rings, starting from the periphery to the center of the trunk. To estimate the age of such trees, we developed a technique by which the missing number of tree rings from the first tree ring in the samples, positioned at a calculated distance (zero radius) from the center of the trunk, was estimated by the number of tree rings formed before reaching the same radius in closely located old trees with healthy centre wood. The purpose of this work was to estimate the age of the unique Velikansha Pine Tree. The age estimation carried out according to our technique showed that the age of Velikansha Pine Tree as of 2023 was about 320 years.