Picea abies
Picea abies, PCAB, Norwegian spruce, (Swedish: gran). The third species in Scandinavia useful for dendrochronology beside Pinus sylvestris and Quercus specimen. Spruces have usually been used most typically for simpler buildings and constructions, like simple barns in peripheral locations outside the villages. Spruce timber is also usually less resistant to insects and fungal deterioration than pine. It is also unusual to find spruces older than 100 to 200 years. By those reasons it is often difficult to build long spruce chronologies.
Spruce is also used for musical string instruments, like violins and guitars, and as the annual ring pattern normally is visible, they often can be measured for dendrochronological investigations. This branch of dendrochronology sometimes is called Dendromusicology. Many instruments are made of wood from not too many sites in central Europe.
Samples and floating chronologies of PCAB are sometimes, but usually not possible to cross date towards PISY-references. In Dalarna the correlation between the two species use to be too low to be useful but in coast near areas in south eastern Sweden, like Nämdö, it seems often possible to date spruce samples towards pine references.[1]
External links
- Wikipedia (Swedish) article about Picea_abies
- Wikipedia (English) article about Picea_abies
- Wikimedia Commons contains a media category related to Picea_abies