As rainfall in South-Central Chile has decreased in recent decades, local communities
and industries have developed an understandable concern about their threatened
water supply. Reconstructing streamflows from tree-ring data has been recognized as
a useful paleoclimatic tool in providing long-term perspectives on the temporal
characteristics of hydroclimate systems. Multi-century long streamflow reconstructions
can be compared to relatively short instrumental observations in order to analyze the
frequency of low and high water availability through time.