INTRODUCTION

The PARC-U of R Tree-Ring Lab is housed with the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative (PARC), a climate change research center at the University of Regina (U of R). Researchers in our lab have built a network of tree-ring chronologies that span the montane, boreal and island forests of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories and northern Montana and North Dakota. In this predominantly sub-humid region, in the rainshadow of the Rocky Mountains, annual tree growth is limited mostly by available soil moisture. Thus our moisture-sensitive tree-ring chronologies are proxies of seasonal and annual hydroclimate and hydrology. They have been applied to the reconstruction of precipitation, drought indices, stream flow, and groundwater levels. The inter-annual to multi-decadal variability in hydroclimate recorded by the tree rings informs our understanding of the climate of the western interior, projections of future climate, reference hydrology and climate derived from instrumental records, and conventional water management and planning that assumes a sufficient and stationary water supply.