A white oak in Montauk is still standing there, doing what trees do—growing quietly year after year. But inside that calm exterior, a record is being written in rings, down to the tiny plumbing structures that move water through the wood.
Coastal forests as storm diaries
The team looked at three coastal forests: two in New York (Montauk and Shelter Island) and one in Newport, Rhode Island.
They collected cores from oak trees at all three sites and analyzed them in two ways.
First, they measured ring width—the traditional tool of dendrochronology—which shows how much a tree grows each year.
Then they examined wood anatomy at the microscopic level, including the size and arrangement of vessels that carry water through the tree.
The point wasn’t just to see whether storms show up, but to figure out whether the signals are clearer when you look beyond growth alone.
Misryoum newsroom analysis indicates that storms and rising seas had detectable marks in the trees’ growth patterns, and not just in the way ring width alone would suggest.
“We went into this asking a pretty basic question: would the storms even show up in the tree rings?
And they did,” said lead author Nicole Davi, a professor at William Paterson University and an adjunct senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which is part of the Columbia Climate School.
“That was exciting on its own, but what really stood out was the trees’ resilience and how quickly their growth bounced back from storms.”
Beyond hurricanes: early signs of sea-level stress
The tree rings, though, may be telling a second story—one that feels more complicated than “storm hits, then bounce back.” In Montauk, Misryoum newsroom reported that the trees grew less in years when coastal water levels were higher than their long-term average.
Sea level rises steadily over the long term, but coastal water levels can run unusually high in certain years because of shifting ocean conditions, weather patterns and tides.
The team suspects that higher water tables or salt exposure may be wearing these forests down, but it’s an area Davi and her colleagues want to dig into further as the research continues.
There’s a practical, almost intimate value to that idea: these sites are rare.
Coauthor Mukund Rao, a research professor at Lamont, said that places like Montauk preserve a long history of environmental change in one place, and that trees recording major hurricanes—and possibly the effects of higher coastal water levels—make them valuable for understanding how coastal ecosystems respond to environmental pressures.
The researchers ultimately want to reconstruct a hurricane history for the Northeast that extends before the 1850s.
They recently received funding to expand their work to more sites and more tree species, and they’ll install dendrometers—tools that track subtle changes in tree growth over time.
That next phase may help researchers get a clearer sense of how coastal forests respond to flooding, salt exposure and other stresses as conditions along the coast continue to change.
Back in Montauk, you can almost imagine the smell of salt air on a windy day while the core is pulled—again, it’s just a small real-world moment, but it sticks. The scientists are trying to turn that kind of everyday coastal reality into a measurable timeline, using wood that remembers.
The research team included Lamont’s Ed Cook, Caroline Leland and Laia Andreu-Hayles (also of the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications in Spain), Arturo Pacheco-Solana of the University of Padua and Neil Pederson of Harvard Forest.
The research was sponsored by the New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium with funds from NOAA’s Office of Sea Grant, U.S.
Department of Commerce.
Facing climate dread: how to plan without certainty