The DendroLab, headed by Professor Franco Biondi, recently received two grants from the National Science Foundation worth a combined total of $466,000. The grants will fund two new projects which Biondi and his colleagues have taken on.

"Receiving funding from NSF is very competitive," Biondi said. "About ten percent of proposals are funded, and that process is very rigorous."

In order to obtain awards from the NSF it is important to be known and respected in the scientific arena. Biondi's work has been cited in nearly 240 scientific papers. He is also a recipient of an NSF Career grant garnering another $400,000 dollars. He is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in Geography, as well as the director of the university's DendroLab, which is the only tree-ring laboratory in the state, and provides analytical services for studies in ecology, archaeology, and geoscience, with a current focus on the Great Basin, the American West, Mexico, and Italy.

The first NSF project is entitled "Tracing the Waters through the Trees: North American Monsoon Dynamics over the past Four Centuries," and was funded by the Geography and Regional Science Program. The study looks at the trends of the North American Monsoon, which starts in Central America in May and works its way through Mexico, Arizona and up to the Great Basin. Looking at tree samples will help to understand the history of the monsoon phenomenon, according to Biondi.

The second project is entitled "Stochastic Modeling of Episode Duration, Magnitude, and Peak in Long Paleo Records." The project is sponsored by the Paleoclimate Program of the NSF. It is a cooperative effort with Dr. Anna Panorska and Dr. Tomasz Kozubowski of the university's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and Dr. Laurel Saito of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science. The objective of the project is to provide a long record of climate based on tree rings, and from this record, generate probability models to determine the chance of climatic episodes, such as drought. The results from the project are designed to help water planners prepare for upcoming years.

"Tree rings are beautiful indicators of environmental change, and all I'm doing is uncovering their silent witnessing of our common past," said Biondi.