Steve Nix is a member of the Society of American Foresters and a former forest resources analyst for the state of Alabama. The most accurate way foresters determine the age of a tree is by ...

Armed with a powerful magnifying glass, he spent a week counting rings. “I knew it was a pretty old tree,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carl T. Hall in 1998. However, he didn’t ...

the more cells the tree makes and the thicker the ring. So if you know the year a tree was cut down, you can count backward to figure out exactly what year a catastrophic drought began.

Researchers can count the number of rings in samples of wood extracted from living specimens and precisely determine a tree’s age. That practice has spawned an entire subfield of scientific ...