The Annual Meeting of the Association of tree ring research -TRACE 2019 - was held in San Leucio, Southern Italy from 7 to 11 of May 2019. Hosted by the Dendrolab of the University of Campania “L. Vanvitelli”, Trace 2019 has been a forum for scientists and students that use tree-rings as a proxy for climatological, environmental, physiological, ecological and historical information.

With the Motto “ From local to global, from molecule to forest stands, from days to millennia”, 205 participants from 33 countries met to discuss about the new challenges offered by dendrosciences to study vegetation dynamics and plant responses to climate changes.

A special session “Wood anatomy meets Dendro Sciences", organized in cooperation with IAWA, was dedicated to wood anatomy and its link with the dendrostudies. The chair, Veronica De Micco, opened the session, underlying the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach where wood anatomy has the key role to gather environmental information that is translated into functional wood traits during plant growth and then remains stored into wood.

The keynote speaker, Hans Beeckman, with his talk "Is there a good reason to consider dendrochronology and wood anatomy as separate disciplines? highlighted the need to integrate dendrochronology and Ecological wood anatomy into a trait-based Ecology in order to strengthen the relevance of each.

The oral presentations and the posters offered a stimulating overview on the current research studies and regarded hot themes including: xylogenesis, monitoring of intra-seasonal anatomical variability, relations between functional wood traits and climate drivers as well as new methods and approaches in wood anatomical studies.

The success of this session confirmed the great interest that this topic offers adding further evidence towards the need of a strict cooperation between wood anatomy and dendrochronology.

Giovanna Battipaglia, Italy (chair of TRACE 2019)