“…Duo to their widespread distribution, accurate dating results, high temporal resolution, and coherent climate signal, tree ring proxies, including the tree ring width (TRW) and latewood density, are the most commonly assimilated proxies in PDA (Acevedo et al, 2015(Acevedo et al, , 2017Dee et al, 2015Dee et al, , 2016Hakim et al, 2016). Previous PDA studies that assimilated TRW adopted either a linear univariate model (LUM), which maps temperatures onto tree ring proxies (Dee et al, 2016;Hakim et al, 2016) or a physically based model known as VS-Lite (VSL;Tolwinski-Ward et al, 2011) that nonlinearly relates tree ring growth to temperature and precipitation (Acevedo et al, 2015(Acevedo et al, , 2017Dee et al, 2016). At present, however, it is difficult to draw a deterministic conclusion regarding the suitability of TRW PSMs for PDA due to two factors: (1) the complex responses of radial tree growth to various climatic factors (Evans et al, 2006;Vaganov et al, 2006;Tolwinski-Ward et al, 2011 are still difficult to understand and describe well, and thus, current TRW PSMs still have clear limitations (Goosse, 2016) and (2) the lack of comprehensive comparisons of TRW PSMs under realistic conditions using existing TRW chronologies rather than pseudo-TRW data (e.g., Acevedo et al, 2015Acevedo et al, , 2017Dee et al, 2016).…”