The TRICE project is scheduled for five years and represents a profound calibration study aiming to enhance our ability to quantify past climatic changes from tree-ring properties, including stable carbon and oxygen isotopes. TRICE undertakes plant physiological and intra-seasonal isotope measurements, as well as novel modelling approaches to greatly improve the mechanistic understanding for a better interpretation of climate proxies from tree-ring archives. Transfer functions are under development to be applied to a network of 150yr time series of ring-width, stable carbon and oxygen isotopes.

The network comprises 10 climatically sensitive tree sites across Germany. TRICE goes far beyond existing tree-ring analyses in its spatial process based investigation and interpretation. An important use of our studies will not only be in dendroclimatology, but also in plant physiology where fundamental isotopic mechanisms are needed. By doing this, TRICE may provide a key to retrospective tree physiology that will enable us better to predict plant response to future global change.