Global assessment of relationships between climate and tree growth

Wilmking, Martin; Maaten‐Theunissen, Marieke van der; Maaten, Ernst van der; Scharnweber, Tobias; Buras, Allan; Biermann, Christine; Gurskaya, M. A.; Hallinger, Martin; Lange, Jelena; Shetti, Rohan; Smiljanić, Marko; Trouillier, Mario

doi:10.1111/gcb.15057

Cited by 137 publications

(137 citation statements)

References 48 publications

(95 reference statements)

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“…Our results showed that the relationships between climate, forest structure, demography and productivity were non-stationary due to climatic and forest structural changes. This result is in line with Wilmking et al (2020) in which they observed that tree growth responses to climate are generally non-stationary. We found that 80% of all SEM paths changed from 23SFI to 34SFI, Westoby, 1984).…”

Section: Climate Forest Structure Demography and Productivity Relsupporting

confidence: 91%

Evidence of non‐stationary relationships between climate and forest responses: Increased sensitivity to climate change in Iberian forests

Astigarraga

Andivia

Zavala

et al. 2020

Global Change Biology

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Climate and forest structure are considered major drivers of forest demography and productivity. However, recent evidence suggests that the relationships between climate and tree growth are generally non-stationary (i.e. non-time stable), and it remains uncertain whether the relationships between climate, forest structure, demography and productivity are stationary or are being altered by recent climatic and structural changes. Here we analysed three surveys from the Spanish Forest Inventory covering c. 30 years of information and we applied mixed and structural equation models to assess temporal trends in forest structure (stand density, basal area, tree size and tree size inequality), forest demography (ingrowth, growth and mortality) and above-ground forest productivity. We also quantified whether the interactive effects of climate and forest structure on forest demography and aboveground forest productivity were stationary over two consecutive time periods. Since the 1980s, density, basal area and tree size increased in Iberian forests, and tree size inequality decreased. In addition, we observed reductions in ingrowth and growth, and increases in mortality. Initial forest structure and water availability mainly modulated the temporal trends in forest structure and demography. The magnitude and direction of the interactive effects of climate and forest structure on forest demography changed over the two time periods analysed indicating non-stationary relationships between climate, forest structure and demography. Above-ground forest productivity increased due to a positive balance between ingrowth, growth and mortality. Despite increasing productivity over time, we observed an aggravation of the negative effects of climate change and increased competition on forest demography, reducing ingrowth and growth, and increasing mortality. Interestingly, our results suggest that the negative effects of climate change on forest demography could be ameliorated through forest management, which has profound implications for forest adaptation to climate change.

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Section: Climate Forest Structure Demography and Productivity Relsupporting

confidence: 91%

Evidence of non‐stationary relationships between climate and forest responses: Increased sensitivity to climate change in Iberian forests

Astigarraga

Andivia

Zavala

et al. 2020

Global Change Biology

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“…This body of evidence suggests more complex and nonlinear growth responses of trees to a changing climate, thereby leading to a decrease in year-to-year sensitivity of tree growth (i.e. "non-stationarity") in previously temperature-limited sites (D'Arrigo et al, 2008;Vaganov et al, 1999;Wilmking, 2005;Wilmking et al, 2020). Potential causes for this divergence include warming-induced thresholds of tree growth (D'Arrigo et al, 2004;Jochner et al, 2018), limitation of growth by nutrient availability (Fajardo and Piper, 2017) or drought stress (Büntgen et al, 2006) or interactions between these factors.…”

Section: Climate Warming Trend Analysis and The Divergence Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the effects of earlier snow melt-out on alpine shrub growth: The sooner the better?

Francon

Corona

Till–Bottraud

et al. 2020

Ecological Indicators

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Enhanced shrub growth in a warming alpine climate has potential far-reaching implications, including soil nutrient cycling, carbon storage, or water and surface energy exchanges. Growth ring analysis can yield mid-to long-term, annually resolved records of shrub growth, and thereby offer valuable insights into how growth is driven by interannual climate variability. In the European Alps, dendroecological approaches have shown that dwarf shrub productivity is influenced by interannual variations of growing season temperature but results also point to a negative effect of winter precipitation on radial growth. However, as past work lacked snow cover data, links between snow cover duration, growing season length, energy availability and inter-annual shrub growth remain poorly understood. In this paper, we combined multi-decadal shrub-ring series from 49 individuals sampled at three sites along a 600-m elevational gradient in the Taillefer massif, located in the French Alps to assess growth sensitivity of long-lived and widespread Rhododendron ferrugineum shrubs to 2 both snow cover dynamics and temperature changes. To this end, we computed structural equation models to track the response of shrub radial growth to extending growing season at 1800, 2000 and 2400 m above sea level and for two time periods (i.e. 1959-1988 and 1989-2016). The second period is marked by a significant advance in snow melt-out resulting in a regime shift highlighted at the end of the 1980s by a breakpoint analysis. At the high-elevation site, our results demonstrate a positive effect of increasing growing season length on shrub growth, which is strongly dependent on snowpack depth and snow cover duration. Conversely, at lower elevations, earlier melt-out dates and associated late frost exposure are shown to lead to radial growth reduction. Moreover, the climate signal in ringwidth chronologies of R. ferrugineum portrays a weakening since 1988similar to a phenomenon observed in series from circumpolar and alpine tree-ring sites and referred to as "divergence". By analyzing long-term records of radial growth along an elevation gradient, our work provides novel insights into the complex responses of shrub growth to climate change in alpine environments. This paper demonstrates that R. ferrugineum, as a dominant alpine shrub species, behave as an ecological indicator of the response of alpine ecosystem to global warming.

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“…That is, the statistical relationship between ring‐width variation and the target climate variable is assumed to be stable over time. In the Anthropocene, an era of unprecedentedly rapid change of the Earth's climate system, this assumption is increasingly violated (Babst et al., 2019; Gustafson, 2013; Wilmking et al., 2020), and is even more likely to be violated in the future as the nonlinear increase in atmospheric evaporative demand with rising temperatures aggravates drought stress on trees. The extrapolation of past climate–growth relationships into conditions outside the domain of calibration may yield erroneous projections (Fritts, 1976).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Continental‐scale tree‐ring‐based projection of Douglas‐fir growth: Testing the limits of space‐for‐time substitution

Klesse

DeRose

Babst

et al. 2020

Global Change Biology

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A central challenge in global change research is the projection of the future behavior of a system based upon past observations. Tree-ring data have been used increasingly over the last decade to project tree growth and forest ecosystem vulnerability under future climate conditions. But how can the response of tree growth to past climate variation predict the future, when the future does not look like the past? Space-for-time substitution (SFTS) is one way to overcome the problem of extrapolation: the response at a given location in a warmer future is assumed to follow the response at a warmer location today. Here we evaluated an SFTS approach to projecting future growth of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), a species that occupies an exceptionally large environmental | 5147 KLESSE Et aL.

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Global assessment of relationships between climate and tree growth

Cited by 137 publications

References 48 publications

Evidence of non‐stationary relationships between climate and forest responses: Increased sensitivity to climate change in Iberian forests

Evidence of non‐stationary relationships between climate and forest responses: Increased sensitivity to climate change in Iberian forests

Assessing the effects of earlier snow melt-out on alpine shrub growth: The sooner the better?

Continental‐scale tree‐ring‐based projection of Douglas‐fir growth: Testing the limits of space‐for‐time substitution

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