Accurate crossdating for silver maple chronology development in the Upper Mississippi River floodplain

Emerging technologies facilitated effective crossdating of silver maple tree rings, revealing synchronous growth patterns and highlighting the dendrochronological potential of this species. Silver maple ( Acer saccharinum L.) is a fast-growing, flood-tolerant species common in bottomland forests of eastern North America. Tree-ring research on silver maple is limited due to the species’ relatively short lifespan and reputation for indistinct rings. Here, we investigated crossdating and growth patterns of silver maple trees from 12 sites along the Upper Mississippi River floodplain. Crossdating this species was challenging due to the presence of false, micro, and locally absent rings. Despite these challenges, we successfully developed 12 silver maple chronologies by combining traditional dendrochronological methods with high-resolution imaging of specimens and an image-based approach to measuring rings and annotating anatomical features. Silver maple trees exhibited high growth variability, robust site-level crossdating (0.50–0.68 mean interseries correlations), and a common regional growth signal, including wide marker rings that were synchronous among sites and coincided with major flood events in the Upper Mississippi River (1965, 1986, 1993, 2001, 2011). The chronologies developed here may have a variety of ecological and management applications, including accurate determination of tree age and analyses of growth response to flooding. Our study demonstrates the considerable dendrochronological potential of silver maple from this region.