Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Evenness indices measure the signal strength of biweight site chronologies

Informally Refereed

Abstract

The signal strength of a biweight site chronology is properly viewed as an outcome of analysis rather than as a property of the forest-climate system. It can be estimated by the evenness of the empirical weights that are assigned to individual trees. The approach is demonstrated for a 45-year biweight chronology obtained from 40 jack pine (Pinus banksiana Lamb.) trees. The annual evenness of the empirical weights is calculated by indices derived from the Shannon and Simpson diversity indices, and the variances are found by the jackknife procedure. The annual estimates are then averaged to find an overall estimate of biweight signal strength for the 45-year period. These techniques are most useful for determining sample sizes for the biweight procedure, and for comparing different methods of detrending and standardizing data sets prior to applying the biweight mean-value function.

Citation

Riitters, Kurt H. 1990. Evenness indices measure the signal strength of biweight site chronologies. Tree-Ring Bulletin, Vol. 50: 21-27
https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/28080