Belfast ecologist forced to hand over tree-ring data

An ecologist at Queens University of Belfast has been ordered by the UK Information Commissioner's Office to release the details of his tree-ring research. This is a remarkable victory for his challenger, climate sceptic Doug Keenan, who first requested to see the data three years ago.

It concerns data that mostly has been collected by Professor Mike Baillie of the university, who has difficulties accepting the decision of the Commissioner - a High Authority in the field of scientific information in the United Kingdom. According to newspaper The Guardian, Baillie depicted the decision as ‘a staggering injustice’: " We prepared the samples and - using quite a lot of expertise and judgment – we measured the ring patterns. Each ring pattern therefore has strong claims to be our copyright. Now, for the price of a stamp, Keenan feels he is entitled to be given all this data. "

Not only Keenan, who has proved to be a critical stalker of climate scientists on multiple fronts, but also the Information Commissioner's Office seems to be thinking this. According to the BBC Keenan, in turn, described the decision of the commissioner: "an important victory for freedom of information in scientific data."

Tree-ring dating or dendrochronology is the study of tree rings to draw conclusions about the years when the tree existed, and inversely with that knowledge to date wooden objects and determine their origin. In this case it involves a collection of over eleven thousand tree samples, mostly oak, which covers a period of seven thousand years. In the Netherlands, a renowned practitioner of this area is the Utrecht professor Esther Jansma, who for some time has been striving to share research data at European level. She wrote about this subject in the December issue of the quarterly e-data & research.