Translating nature's history through tree rings
What stories are locked inside a tree? Clay Tucker, graduate student in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University, discusses his research in dendroclimatology and how
he uses tree rings to predict future hurricanes along the Louisiana Gulf Coast and
advise residents on becoming more resilient to these natural disasters. (Transcript below.)
Listen to the full episode below, and subscribe to LSU Experimental on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Transcript
Becky Carmichael
[0:00] This is Experimental, where we explore exciting research occurring at Louisiana State University and learn about the individuals posing the questions. Today, Clay Tucker, graduate student in the Department of Geography and Anthropology, shares his research on dendrochronology along the Louisiana Gulf Coast; translating nature's history to predict the next storm.
Clay Tucker
[0:20] Think about the last thunderstorm you experienced. What do you recall? Did you notice what happened to the trees? What happened to the ground, to your house? What did your neighbors do? Everybody reacts differently. My grandmother was always the first to bolt outside to hear the thunderclap. Perhaps you lost power and your neighbor's tree lost some branches and leaves. Simultaneously, you and nature experienced the same weather event. I can talk to you and get a personal account of the storm. But I can also talk to the tree and ask what it thought about the storm. That's what I do for a living. I translate the language of trees. I am a dendrochronologist, someone who studies tree rings. Trees can live much longer than people, so we tell their stories over long time periods, and eventually infer what the climate or the landscape or just the general environment was like in the past, you've probably seen evidence of this yourself. Perhaps you've seen a cut down tree and noticed it's concentric rings, but what exactly is a tree ring? Each year a tree produces a ring in its trunk just like a person grows a little bit each year. So to personify trees for a minute, if a tree is happy all year, for example, it gets adequate nutrients and sunlight, the ring is nice and large and the tree grows. But on some years the tree may be stressed, get less water or less sunlight, or maybe it encounters a storm. The ring is smaller, more narrow. These are the stories recorded in tree rings and we can compare the experiences of trees with the stories of people that lived during the same time period. Let me tell you the story of my pine tree community. Most of them were born in the early 20th century. They had a wonderful life in the beginning and grew tall and strong. But after about 15 years, their health began to suffer. They recovered but never to a perfect state. Every 10 years or so their health would suffer, it would bounce back, suffer and bounce back. In particular, 1969 and 2005, many of their friends passed away. But the survivors still lived to tell the tale of those years. This might sound like a story that your grandparents may have told in the past, when in fact, it is just an analysis of the tree’s rings. And just like the stories you might tell one day, if we listened closely, the stories of the trees aren't just informative. They have a lesson too. I'm old enough to remember a few hurricanes: Isaac, Gustav, Katrina, and Andrew. I'm 26 years old. So that means about every seven years, I was affected by Hurricane. But we know that it wasn't every seven years. Exactly. Really, it was just about a one in seven chance of getting a hurricane every year. That's my story of hurricanes that affected me. The trees tell their stories, too. And if we listen to their stories and marry them with ours, we can get really long, reliable hurricane histories. You trust the stories of older generations more than those of children, right? Just like we trust the stories that trees tell. Their stories hold "clout", because the trees are old, and their lessons are wise. They tell stories just like your grandparents would.
Becky Carmichael
[3:28] Clay Thank you for coming and sitting down with me today to discuss your research here at LSU.
Clay Tucker
[3:33] Thank you for having me, Becky.
Becky Carmichael
[3:34] So to kind of get us started, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, who you are, and what is your research that you're doing here?
Clay Tucker
[3:42] So I'm a Ph.D. student at LSU. I also have a masters and a Bachelor's in the same degree I'm receiving right now, both in geography, and I study tree rings. I study how hurricanes affect trees, and then in those tree rings, then with the growth part the trunk of the tree, you can see past events like hurricanes.
Becky Carmichael
[4:04] So for someone who's unfamiliar with how to study tree rings, how do you do this?
Clay Tucker
[4:08] That's a great question. So one way you can do it is cut down the tree. That's obviously, I'm sure someone has cut down a tree , and there are traumatic- there's something called traumatic resin ducts that happen when- when you cut down a tree, that's interesting, you use that wording, but that is obviously not something that people who like to study trees want to do. We don't want to cut down all of our research. So we use something called an increment bore, which is about the size of a pencil. It goes into the tree it screws into the tree. Out comes a little piece of the tree and we can look at the rings in that little piece. Just like you would see it in the trunk, you would see it in this little core. We call it a core.
Becky Carmichael
[4:45] Oh wow. How long does it take to collect that core?
Clay Tucker
[4:49] That core, one individual core, depending on the species, some species are really- don't like to be cored. They're really dense wood like oak trees, but the pine trees that I work on, you can get a core in about 10 minutes.
Becky Carmichael
[5:00] Oh, wow. Yeah. So for your community of, of pine trees, what's some of the information that those cores are telling you?
Clay Tucker
[5:08] Yeah. So the first thing we really want to know is the age of the trees, that can tell us if we can, what we call, extend the chronology of tree rings, which is, you know, we don't just take one tree sample, right? That tree might be biased, just like if you polled a whole bunch of people and you took one of their answers. They're going to be biased. So we take a group of trees, and we want to see if we can take those years, the age of those trees, and extend it as far back in time as possible. So the first thing we want to do is age. And after that you can answer a huge myriad of questions from climate to hurricanes, landscape change, climate change, of course, a myriad of questions after that.
Becky Carmichael
[5:51] So as an ecologist and having worked in the longleaf, pine Savanna, I imagine along with the hurricanes and wind storms, you are also able to extract evidence of any kind of recurring fire.
Clay Tucker
[6:04] Yeah, that's a great point then in the southeast United States, some people actually suggest that fires occurred as often as every one to three years in the past. And just like you would expect to see it, you know, every one to three years in your lifetime, the tree saw it in its lifetime, every one to three years. So when you core that tree, or maybe you cut a small section out of the tree to analyze it a bit more, you can see I'm sure you know about cat faces, which are the outside of trees where they have been burned, you can see evidence of prior burns and the outside, you can also go into the inside of that tree trunk and see when burns happened in the past. So the way we determine that the historical fire frequency was every one to three years, is we go back and look at tree rings and in the tree rings, every one to three tree rings. We see evidence of a fire so charring or some other kind of evidence of fire and that's how we determine how we might manage forest in the future as well.
Becky Carmichael
[6:59] So I want you to tell me a little, a bit more about the tree ring information. How do you verify? I mean, obviously, you just said that, you know, you take several cores within a group of the same species within that area and kind of compare those. But what other information do you compare to those tree rings to verify that you're, you're actually on to seeing, predicting, or viewing that, that chronological? Absolutely. disturbances?
Clay Tucker
[7:25] Absolutely. So the probably the most important that we analyze against is what's called historical records. People write down things, right. That's what we do. And we write down when these fires happened in the past or when a hurricane might have happened. So I do a lot of research with hurricanes. We, the National Hurricane Center at NOAA, has decent very good records back to the 1850s for hurricanes. And if I say a hurricane happened in 1915, which one didn't impact Louisiana's coast in 1915 If I go back and look at my trees, and in 1915, I see what we call a suppression in growth or where the growth decreased in the tree. Following that, that 1915 hurricane, I say, well, the humans recorded in 1915 hurricane, the tree recorded in 1915 hurricane. So now I can go back. And we don't have any records before 18 or we have minimal records before 1850. So if the tree is older than that, we can say well, that's when we can start extending what we know that humans already know. We can compare to what the trees now
Becky Carmichael
[8:34] and so that would be that suppression. That's that narrowing of that tree ring as you discussed in your monologue. Okay, so the other piece of this that I wanted to ask you is the frequency so we've heard about, you know, one in seven years, the Thousand Year flooding events. Can you talk a little bit and explain that a little bit further. What does that really mean?
Clay Tucker
[8:53] Yeah, that's a great question. So recently in South Louisiana, we had huge floods. Some of them were called one in 1000 year floods, or often we term things in one 100 year return periods. It essentially means that the statistics show that in the 100 year period of record, one event has occurred at that magnitude. So, for, for example, Hurricane Katrina, in the 1852-2005. Record, Hurricane Katrina had the worst damage in that record. So you could say that Hurricane Katrina was the 150 year return period hurricane. In some cases, in some cases, we can do some different statistics to answer different questions. And we get different values. But the real problem is that it's not just something that occurs one every 150 times. So something that has a 100 year return period can actually happen more often than every hundred years. It also doesn't mean which it's really misleading. It doesn't mean that in 100 years from now, we will get another event. It could be next year, the actual statistic says that it has a 1% chance of occurring, if it has a 100 year return period. So each year, we can have a huge event. It's just a low chance.
Becky Carmichael
[10:18] So this might be a good time for you to tell us a little bit more about how you've married the ecology, and then the societal component. So with records that on hurricanes back, you said 1850.
Clay Tucker
[10:32] That's right. Yes.
Becky Carmichael
[10:32] So it's, so tell me a little bit about how you're marrying these I mean, and also to what brought you to that intersect. Why did that interest you so much?
Clay Tucker
[10:43] That's a good question. I'm just gonna answer that last part of that question first. Yeah. I've obviously been affected by hurricanes as I mentioned in my monologue, and I was pretty much I wasn't raised on the coast, but I was every summer my dad would bring us to the coast to go fishing or hunting or something like that. So I was very married to the ecological environment for that reason. And then of course, the human environment where our house would get flooded or a tree would be knocked down. Something along those lines. So both the cultural and the ecological met really well with the study of dendrochronology. Where we don't have many coastal dendrochronology studies. Can you ask that first part? Again,
Becky Carmichael
[11:26] I have to remember that first part I was asking you about, oh, the records. So I guess what I'm really interested or intrigued by is, you know, and then going back to you to that time frame and that frequency, you know, if we only have records of these hurricanes, one specific disturbance that we can examine and read from tree coring. How then are we making any adjustments on that frequency based on both? That's the story as well as those cores.
Clay Tucker
[11:58] Yes, that's that's a that's a really good question. And it kind of there's, in my studies so far and coastal dendrochronology. Since it's a young science, we have few records that go back farther than the historical record. But what we do have really cool records of is drought in the West. And we can show using tree rings that the droughts in the West are really not that bad right now, in terms of the last 2000 years. So, for example, the Grand Canyon dams, who like Hoover Dam was built during a time when rainfall was higher than it's ever been in the last 2000 years. So that's why the dam is really is really gone down the water in the dam has really gone down a lot now because when you say that the dam needs to be regulated on some of the highest rainfall records in the last 2000 years, well in the next 2000 years, it's not going to be that wet. So you really reduce the amount of water that you can have in the future. And when we use tree rings to look back in the past, we can say, Oh man, this is not going to be the resources that we're going to have in the future because this is rare now. So that's a really good example of how we can use these records of the past to talk about what happens in the future.
Becky Carmichael
[13:14] I can also imagine in light of climate change and the continual loss of Louisiana coast, we're losing records both on the ecological side as well as the societal side, because there's a lot of information that's just being washed away or taken up. Correct? Yes, yes. So as a dendrochronologist, of the coastal Louisiana. How are you accounting for this disappearing information?
Clay Tucker
[13:43] That's a fantastic question. As I mentioned before, coastal dendrochronology is pretty rare. There's not many dendrochronology studies that look at the coast, and it's in large part because the coast is mostly salt water. We have few trees that live near the coast. Well the coast is getting closer inland now because of sea level rise. So we're getting a lot of we're getting a lot of trees that would normally not get affected by salt water are now getting affected by salt water. So one of the things you can look at with tree rings is how often they get inundated by salt water. Hurricane storm surge is a really good example. But that's not the only thing that will will will inundate inland marshes and swamps. So what we can see is and this is actually part of a an ancient bald Cypress site that was found offshore underwater 60 feet underwater with Dr. Kristine DeLong , Grant Harley, some people all over the Gulf Coast.
Becky Carmichael
[14:33] Yes, yes.
Clay Tucker
[14:34] And perhaps you've heard of it.
Becky Carmichael
[14:36] Yes. I have
Clay Tucker
[14:36] It's called the ancient bald cypress underwater forest.
Becky Carmichael
[14:40] And I know it's like super secret, but I like totally. I totally want to go see it. But I...
Clay Tucker
[14:45] Yeah, so they're trying to protect it as much as possible, but it is sort of secretive. But I'm sort of involved in that, in that research. It's really led by Kristine DeLong at LSU. But essentially what the dendrochronology that they're showing on those trees is that we see high variabilities in tree rings, they get really big and really small and really big and really small. And we expect that to be because salt water was inundating. And then maybe a river would come through and give some fresh water and then salt water would inundate again, and then all the trees died at the same time.
Becky Carmichael
[15:16] Wow.
Clay Tucker
[15:17] Well, the trees that I have on the coast show really high variability. So, you know, we can kind of assess how fast salt waters inundating these areas. And then of course, with the loss of a freshwater environment, we lose all those resources: timber, crawfish, freshwater fisheries, all those kind of things. We lose when we lose those trees.
Becky Carmichael
[15:38] Well and the buffers to those hurricanes and subsequent events. That's right. So the tree cores are not only allowing you to examine one community or one population of species, but it's also allowing you to have some comparative information to examine different areas along the- along the coast.
Clay Tucker
[15:57] Yeah, so one of the things we do in dendroclimatology, dendrochronology, or paleoclimatology, which is the study of past climates, is that we can compare these, these tree growths to pretty much anything. So we call it wiggle matching. Basically, the tree has a certain measurement of ringlets. And we have all kinds of records, hurricanes, precipitation, drought, I'm sure some people have heard of El Nino, La Nina, we have all these records, and we can compare them to all of these records. We can compare tree rings to, for example, El Nino. So when we get an El Nino, trees have big growth and we equate that to more precipitation in the south. And so this is not just, you know, things for the trees that I studied just that one couple of acres of trees that I study, but its water resources for the entire South Southern United States from Southern California to Miami, you know, so we can look at these these precipitation patterns and what, what precipitation we might expect in the future, just based on a few studies if we wanted to.
Becky Carmichael
[17:05] So obviously, having worked with it, with the fire component, this is all very exciting to me.
Clay Tucker
[17:11] Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. You need to do an experiment podcast on you, Becky.
Becky Carmichael
[17:15] Oh my god. It would just be me geeking out over fire and burning things down.
Clay Tucker
[17:19] Hey that’s okay, well I like that.
Becky Carmichael
[17:22] ...or chasing invasive species. So, um...
Clay Tucker
[17:25] Yes, invasive species. We can talk about that too, if you want.
Becky Carmichael
[17:29] Oh, my gosh, I still think that I have infected my garden with some invasive species. By wearing my field clothes and then walking into my garden, I don't know what I was thinking. I just was like, I got out of the car like, "Oh, how are my tomatoes?" And then I'm like, oh yeah, there's stuff. Anyway.
Clay Tucker
[17:45] I'm sure you could talk about that for hours. And so could I.
Becky Carmichael
[17:47] Go on and on. Yeah. And when did you first realize that this? This was it, because you've just said you have your bachelor's and your master's in this area.
Clay Tucker
[17:57] That's right. That's right. That's right. So my bachelor's is in Geography, my master's is in geography, my Ph.D. is working on geography all, from the same institution as well. They're all from LSU.
Becky Carmichael
[18:06] You got some love there, then.
Clay Tucker
[18:08] There's a lot of love in Baton Rouge for me. Yes, that's true. And we can talk about that too, if you want. But, so this is how this is how the story goes. It's a really great story. I was a horrible student, as a freshman, I won't say what my GPA was. I don't think it's public record. So I won't say what it was. But I was a horrible student as a freshman when I entered college, and I took a geography class just as an elective with Dr. Barry Khan, who's in geography department still here. And I was number one in a class of 120 students and like I had a really bad freshman year, and I was number one in the class of 120 students. He actually Dr. Khan took me out to lunch at the end of the semester, and as they say, from there, it's geography. I entered the master's program. I graduated and entered the PhD program and that's, it's really a simple story of somewhat serendipity.
Becky Carmichael
[19:00] That's amazing. And I think that that says a lot. It's finding and meeting that right person. And then
Clay Tucker
[19:05] Sure, yeah, I mean, and I'm not saying that that's exactly how you have to enter this world. But let's- everybody's got their story and mine is as simple as that.
Becky Carmichael
[19:13] When you're not doing your research and you're not on campus, you know, eyeball deep in, in completing your dissertation. What are things that you like to do to relax?
Clay Tucker
[19:26] That's a great question. Another great question from Becky, how about that? So as I mentioned before, my dad was really instrumental. I'm an only child. Like, I could say that I guess my dad is really instrumental in showing me the coast. My dad was a scuba diver for 25 years, a recreational scuba diver. He is possibly one of the reasons we have low fish stocks in the Gulf of Mexico. And he showed me about these resources. He's much more of a conservationist now. We throw back many species of fish, but one of the biggest things I do is I go to the coast as often as possible. My dad has, what we call, a camp down there. And I go as much, as often as possible and witness the wonderful vast resources Louisiana has either by fishing or shrimping. I've done... or just going down there to look at what's happening. So I'm on the coast often for research. I'm on the coast even more often for recreational activities. Another thing I do is watch Netflix like we all do. But I find it super relaxing to watch documentaries. Couldn't name hundreds of documentaries. My favorite are actually food documentaries as Louisianimal. I am a foodie. And so one of my favorite things to do and relaxing is to actually listen to a lot of what other people are doing for science. I think that I just watched another TED talk today about listening and how important listening is and listening to other people do science is actually really relaxing because it lets me digest everything that I'm talking about during the day and learning about during the day. And I can basically listen to someone else do what I do. Everybody's got a purpose. So why not listen.
Becky Carmichael
[21:17] I also think when you're listening to somebody else, and the work that they do, you are also, either you're seeing yourself or you're, you're having a connection, because you're thinking "ah man." If you're struggling in that moment - yeah so then you're able to say, "Okay, I need to take a break." And I like to call them brain breaks. And if you can hear someone else say, too, that they're struggling and they're having that you could identify and I think that that, that helps, it's that supporting piece.
Clay Tucker
[21:44] And everybody's got their own way of doing it. That's just my way of doing it. And I, I didn't realize until my old roommate had Netflix and how great Netflix was so... plugging Netflix. (Laughter)
Becky Carmichael
[21:56] Except for I managed to find on Netflix the most depressing documentaries so like a faculty member recommended that I check out Chasing Coral.
Clay Tucker
[22:09] Oh, yeah, yeah. Chasing Ice guy made Chasing Coral. I haven't seen it yet.
Becky Carmichael
[22:14] Yeah, yeah, I, so I'm a big baby apparently. Like I sat, I sat there and I'm watching it and I, I just like I just started crying because...
Clay Tucker
[22:21] Well I cried during the West Wing. So it's ok.
Becky Carmichael
[22:23] Oh, okay. Okay, good. Yeah. So, I want to, you know, if we think back to you, you're talking to you about your, your, your dad taking us to the coast. I talked about crying. I can also see where, you know, that's that that loss? Or those changes are really maybe shaping some of the, is it shaping some of the questions that you're asking?
Clay Tucker
[22:24] Oh, I didn't know where you were going with that. So you did talk about a loss. I recently, or well, it's been a while now, but came across the paper that talked about how Louisiana's estuary is the lost of those asteroids. So the loss of the sediment, the organic accumulation from plants, all this loss, basically, you could consider it like nutrients going into the water. And so the more loss you have, I mean, it's not, this isn't scientific, but essentially, the more of this March that breaks up, the more habitat you have for different organisms. So for one, for one example, shrimp love little nooks and crannies in the coastline. I've heard of our coast as the coast with no coastline because it's really jagged and we have all kind of bays and inlets and stuff. And so these little nooks and crannies that open up with the loss, the land loss are good, nice little nurseries for different organisms. You're also taking all those nutrients that were trapped into the soil and you're putting it into the water. So of course there is a large amount of loss. Yes, there's land loss, physical land loss, but a lot of this is what's the reason we have such a productive fishery and such a productive estuary is because of this. The land is giving its way to the sea, and at the same time the sea is imparting its beauty on the land. So how does that affect my research? Well, as scientists, we don't try to put any bias in our research. So I think it really helps me to instead of every time I write about something, oh, it's land loss. Oh, it's a detriment to the environment. Oh, it's terrible. Well, maybe I can find out ways that are promising to the future. What trees we can plant or what plants we can plant in certain areas for new habitat or how can we manage the estuary and the fisheries as best as possible?
Becky Carmichael
[24:44] So clay, what's the craziest the weirdest or the most dangerous thing that you have done in the name of science and research?
Clay Tucker
[24:53] So there is something every year put on by a group of tree ring people called N.A.D.E.F, the North American DendroEcological Fieldweek. It's actually just ended yesterday for this year. I was not able to attend this year, I've attended twice in the past. It's possibly one of my favorite weeks of the year. But we're in very odd environments. One was in Acadia National Park in Maine.
Becky Carmichael
[25:16] Oh, wow.
Clay Tucker
[25:17] Yeah, two years ago was in basically Mount Rainier.
Becky Carmichael
[25:22] Oh my gosh.
Clay Tucker
[25:22] We climbed to the treeline of Mount Rainier, which is a mountain and I am not a mountainous guy. I was born and raised in Baton Rouge. So I don't know a whole lot about mountains. I've skied but I don't know a whole lot about mountains. And a very sheer cliff face was where we were analyzing some of these trees, coring some trees for this fieldweek. And where we do this whole big study in basically nine days Well, this sheer Cliff went down straight to a road. And I didn't think twice about it. I was really just in tennis shoes, but we had to get, we had to get the science, you know, we had to get the data. So I went to this tree that was basically growing on 90 degree Cliff face, no rock climbing equipment, and later realized that that was not the most- I was not in detriment as much to myself as I was to the people below me. So there was some soil on this cliff face. And we watched rocks like fall all the way down to the road. Nobody was there and I didn't fall off the mountain. So.
Becky Carmichael
[26:21] This is good.
Clay Tucker
[26:23] This is all good. That's probably the most dangerous environment I've ever been in. For the in the name of science, we had to get the science we got the science, I'm proud to say. And we extended some chronologies for Mount Rainier.
Becky Carmichael
[26:35] Oh my gosh. So when did you, when did you realize, kind of, where you were? Did you-
Clay Tucker
[26:42] When I got off, I would not have gotten on it. Like I said, Yeah, so and I got back up and I looked down and I was like, Oh my goodness, how did I stay on that side of the mountain? And then the person that my friend of mine next to me said, you realize that was not the dangerous part of the dangerous part. was like maybe a rockslide could have gone all the way down the mountain. And it would have been caused by me. So I think I think everything's fine. I haven't been back since. But it was. That's probably, I would love to say it was somewhere on the coast. But I almost want to say, the coast is inoculated to problems that mountains face. So mountains. I do love the coast, and let's just keep keep it there.
Becky Carmichael
[27:29] I don't know what my favorite environment is just yet. But I do have to admire that. You know, in the moment, you're focused, you're focused, you're like, I'm gonna go get that data. I gotta go get this. I've got this team with me. And it's good. It's good that you mentioned that you had a group of people with you.
Clay Tucker
[27:42] Yes, it was. Yes. It was a big group.
Becky Carmichael
[27:44] Yes. Good. So then there were people around that could say, Don't do that. Don't do that. But I shouldn't have done that. And that I think was the problem. They said later. Oh, you should have done that. Because I think they were all, too in that mindset of getting that data.
Clay Tucker
[27:56] Oh, definitely. Oh, definitely. It's an extreme week. It's pretty exciting. Yeah, definitely a big thing and get that data. Yeah.
Becky Carmichael
[28:04] What is the one thing that you would want listeners to know about kind of your work and where this is going to lead? So then why, why is this so important?
Clay Tucker
[28:19] Yeah, obviously, that's, it's easy for me to understand why it's important because I love doing it. But as with any NSF proposal, you might write broader impacts are what makes your research research shine. So why would people want to care? I think this might be true for a lot of Environmental Sciences is that the human environment that we're living in now is also home to the natural environment and it mirrors, it mirrors everything that happens around that natural environment, even a place as human as New York City has an estuary, it's very polluted, and it's you can't harvest anything there but there's still a natural environment there. And every place has a specific purpose, reason, people live there in certain ways. So like in the desert people wear light colored clothes and loose clothing. Big cities are often pop up in places where the weather is easy to deal with, like Los Angeles. And then, for example, people in Louisiana build houses on stilts. So, you know, often the human environment and the natural environment are mirrored. And if we analyze the landscape, in turn, we're analyzing ourselves
Becky Carmichael
[29:33] In the next five years, after you, I should say, after you complete your dissertation, what are you going to do?
Clay Tucker
[29:38] Well, go to Disney World. (Laughter) No uh, so when I first, when I first started academia, when I first started my masters, I really wanted to stay in academia. I want to be a professor at an R1 institution. I don't want to say it's as bleak as I have no idea what I want to do anymore, but I have increasingly wanted to do outreach more, which is one of the reasons I love doing this podcast is because education and research are really important. That's what academia is all about. But if, if you go into outreach, you have to do the education and research as it is. And I hope that I am a person that can communicate really well, if everybody has issues with communication. That's why there's like, half the TED talks are on how to communicate with people. But hopefully, I will improve those skills and outreach. Something like Louisiana Sea Grant is a great place to work. Communication Across the Curriculum is a great place to work. But something like that, so outreach is really where I'd love to be in the next five years in any capacity.
Becky Carmichael
[30:40] So if there's any students that are listening now, that would be interesting. Do you ever take volunteers out with you so that they can kind of.
Clay Tucker
[30:48] Oh yeah.
Becky Carmichael
[30:49] Oh, really?
Clay Tucker
[30:50] Well, yeah. I mean, anybody who can help you do your work is great I think. If anybody, if anyone wants to come help me, absolutely. They should email me I know there's probably caveats with that I don't do easy work. Field work is not the easiest thing in the world. But it can be really fun too. And the field work that I do is really tangible. When that core comes out of the tree, you can see the rings in the tree immediately. So and you know, just by this podcast here, most people can probably understand what tree ring research is all about. So doing the fieldwork or people coming out. And not just with me, there are a lot of dendrochronologists around the United States. I'm one of the few at LSU. They're really more in mountainous, arid, high latitude environments. But there's people all over the world that do tree rings, so.
Becky Carmichael
[31:37] Well there's trees in a lot of different places. So we should kind of hear what their stories were telling us.
Clay Tucker
[31:42] That's exactly that's exactly right.
Becky Carmichael
[31:44] Okay Clay, is there anything else, Clay that you would like to share with us today?
Clay Tucker
[31:48] Go Tigers, I am a tiger fan. Since I will have three degrees from here. I hope I'm a Tigers fan.
Becky Carmichael
[31:55] I was gonna say if you're not there, that's there's something wrong.
Clay Tucker
[31:59] I have three degrees. And seven generations of Baton Rougeans before me so I'm definitely a Tigers fan Go Tigers.
Becky Carmichael
[32:07] Clay thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I really appreciate it.
Clay Tucker
[32:10] Thank you very much Becky, it was exciting.
Unknown Speaker
[32:12] Experimental was recorded and produced in the KLSU Studios here on the campus of Louisiana State University, and is supported by LSU Communication Across the Curriculum, and the College of Science. Today's interview was conducted by Becky Carmichael and edited by Chris Dellinger. To learn more about today's episode, subscribe to the podcast, ask questions, and recommend future investigators visit cxc.lsu.edu/experimental.