The Effect of Climate on Tree-Ring Chronologies of Native and Nonnative Tree Species Growing Under Homogenous Site Conditions

Abstract

Dendroclimatic studies were carried out in the experimental stands composed of many tree species situated in the Polish part of the Baltic sea-coast. Increment cores were taken from a 100-years old trees of 2 native species: Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.), and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) and 3 nonnative species: Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco), Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis (Bong.) Carr.) and Silver fir (Abies alba Mill.). Thirty trees of each species were cored. The relationships between the diameter increment and the thermal and pluvial conditions during the period from 1925 to 2005 were analyzed on the basis of standardized tree-ring chronologies and climatic data. It was found that precipitation and temperature of the growing season and months preceding that season affected the annual diameter increment of all investigated tree species. The current year winter and early spring temperatures as well as February and August precipitation had a similar effect on the variation of diameter increment of trees. On the other hand thermal and pluvial conditions of the current year June differentiated the increment rhythm of individual species. A very strong negative effect on diameter growth of trees was observed in the case of winter and early spring frosts. Norway spruce turned out to be a species most resistant to low temperatures. The investigated tree species, especially Norway spruce, was susceptible to water deficiency in the soil during spring and summer. In the case of Scots pine a high precipitation in June stimulated its growth. The diameter increments of Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, Scots pine, and Silver fir were more strongly connected with air temperature than with precipitation. So called all-species chronology of tree-ring width, constructed during this study, permitted to verify the factors having a similar effect on growth response of the investigated tree species. It reflected the mutual characteristics of diameter increments of trees of various species.

An attempt to dendroclimatic reconstruction of winter temperature based on multispecies tree-ring widths and extreme years chronologies (example of Upper Silesia, Southern Poland)

“…A number of recent dendroclimatological investigation have analyzed winter (e.g., Popa and Cheval 2007;Zhu et al 2009) or summer mean temperature (e.g., Li et al 2011), maximum and minimum temperature (Wilson and Luckman 2002) and extremes (Battipaglia et al 2010), based on individual single proxy or the so called all-species chronology (multispecies chronologies as the arithmetic mean of these records) (e.g., Büntgen et al 2005;Feliksik and Wilczyński 2009). In this study, we give an insight into the use of composite models, simultaneously using a number of temperature sensitive species and an additional extreme index.…”

Growth responses of Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.) to the climate in the south-eastern part of the Českomoravská Upland (Czech Republic)

“…A positive correlation between precipitation and increments for May until September was also found in the nearby Drahany Highlands (Rybníček et al, 2012), with a similar character of the summer weather, yet with considerably higher precipitation (over 500 mm on average in MarchSeptember). A positive effect of precipitation in summer or one of summer months on the Norway spruce radial increment has been found in many similar studies in Europe (Feliksik et al, 1994;Desplanque et al, 1999;Vitas, 2004;Koprowski and Zielski, 2006;Feliksik and Wilczyński, 2009;Bouriaud and Popa, 2009;Rybníček et al, 2010a;Affolter et al, 2010). A significant positive correlation was also identified in other conifers, for example pine (Szczepanek et al, 2006;Bouriaud and Popa, 2009).…”

“…The relations between the climate and the radial increment of spruce has recently been explored in Europe by e.g. Mäkinen et al (2000;, Vitas (2004), Koprowski and Zielski (2006), Saava et al (2006), Feliksik and Wilczyński (2009), Bouriaud and Popa (2009), Rybníček et al (2009;2010a;, Aakala and Kuuluvainen (2011), Affolter et al (2010) and Gryc et al (2011Gryc et al ( , 2012.…”

Evaluating similarity of radial increments around tree stem circumference of European beech and Norway spruce from Central Europe

“…Bigler et al, 2004;Gray et al, 2004;Muzika et al, 2004;Büntgen et al, 2006;Carrer and Urbinati, 2006;Koprowski and Zielski, 2006;Esper et al, 2007;Büntgen et al, 2007;Čejková and Kolář, 2009;Feliksik and Wilczyński, 2009;Bijak, 2010;Fang et al, 2010;Bošeľa et al, 2011;Bošeľa et al, 2014;Dittmar et al, 2012;Hökkä et al, 2012), and studies using more than two cores or discs are less frequent (e.g. Brienen and Zuidema, 2005;Ďurský et al, 2006;Van Der MaatenTheunissen et al, 2013) because they are costly and destructive.…”