The LTRR is home to the world's largest and most diverse collection of tree-ring specimens. Housed in the dedicated Tree-Ring Archive Building adjoining the Bryant Bannister Tree-Ring Building, the repository has two environmentally controlled floors containing 4.4km of shelving as well as a separate curation work area. The repository is the only facility for the storage of tree-ring specimens with a formal federal repository agreement, and contains many samples from federally protected lands.
Prior to moving in to our current facilities in 2013, the LTRR specimens were housed in various 'temporary' facilities - primarily under the UA Stadium. The task of cataloging and moving specimens collected over the past 90 years is well under way but a great deal of work is still to be done. Funding from the Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Science Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Endowment for the Humanities is continuing to support this enormous task.
The LTRR is the custodian of tree-ring collections that have meaning and significance beyond our community of scientists and disciplinary scholars. We recognize that the mission of the LTRR has benefited greatly from material collected from Indigenous lands, including current tribal lands and ancestral homelands, and from (often unacknowledged and uncredited) partnerships with Indigenous people and Tribal Nations. We are currently working to make the Indigenous data in our collections visible and accessible through outreach, education, open-ended collaboration, and data sharing. Our long-term goal is to develop partnerships with Indigenous peoples, groups, and organizations that have a claim to, or interest in, the tree-ring collections archived at the LTRR to better care for and steward both past and future collections.