A 100-Year History of Floods Determined from Tree Rings in a Small Mountain Stream in the Tatra Mountains, Poland

Dendrochronological methods enable the dating of episodes with sudden disturbance events such as forest fires, tree uprooting, rockfall, and snow avalanches in time and space (e.g. Denneler and Schweingruber 1993; Fantucci 1999; Lang et al. 1999; Niklasson and Granström 2000; Storaunet and Rolstad 2004; Stoffel and Perret 2006). Tree rings have also been used to identify floods and raised water levels (Harrison and Reid 1967; Begin and Payette 1988; Hupp 1988; Gottesfeld and Gottesfeld 1990; Tardif and Bergeron 1997; Begin 2001). Information on past activity might be preserved in living trees or dead stumps, thus allowing a long-term reconstruction of past flood events (LePage and Bégin 1996; Yanoski 1999; St George and Nielsen 2003). The time window accessible using tree scars is probably wider than that achieved by dating coarse woody debris accumulated in stream channels. This seems to be especially true for small, steep mountain streams with water flow causing redistribution, fragmentation and abrasion of tree trunks shortly after their delivery to the channel.