WASHINGTON, D.C. - Speaking at the White House today, University of Arkansas professor David Stahle called for stronger government efforts to preserve ancient forests so scientists can better understand current climate patterns.

Stahle, who for 25 years has studied tree rings and their relation to climate, joined David Tilman from the Univ. of Minnesota and Gary Meffe, editor of "Conservation Biology," to brief members of Congress, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the chief of the U.S. Forest Service on the scientific merits of ancient forests. Their visit was sponsored by a lobbying group called Save America's Forests. The group hopes to win support for the Act to Save America's Forests, introduced in 1997, which would end clear-cut logging, limit roads in remote forests and protect biodiversity on federal forest lands.

"I'm not satisfied with the level of attention paid by the government to ancient forests," Stahle said. "The trees are libraries of environmental history that can help us understand what we are doing now to change the environment."

Stahle and his colleagues examine tree rings to discover clues about past global climate changes. They have used tree ring chronologies to reconstruct the history of drought in North America for the past 300 years. They also studied the history of El Nino, an abnormal warming of the eastern tropical Pacific that causes changes in weather patterns world wide, using tree ring chronologies from around the world. They discovered that El Nino events have increased in frequency in the past 100 years.

"The tree ring data provide a means to measure historic weather patterns," he said.

Earlier this year, Stahle and his colleagues found clues to 16th century climate in tree rings that show the settlers from the first English colony in America, who landed on Roanoke Island, arrived during the worst drought in 800 years. Their research was published in Science.

"It would have been impossible to find this out without the tree ring data," Stahle said.

Stahle and fellow scientists have found ancient forest remnants all over the United States, including many eastern states such as Arkansas, Florida, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Virginia. These ancient forest remnants in the East vary in size from a few acres to thousands of acres, and most remain at risk due to logging and development.

The Act to Save America's Forests will help to change that by protecting old-growth forests still found on federal lands, Stahle said.

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