The rarity of absent growth rings in Northern Hemisphere forests outside the American Southwest

Abstract

We present a synthesis of locally absent (or “missing”) growth rings across the Northern Hemisphere based on 2359 publicly available tree ring‐width records. During the last millennium, widespread absent rings have been observed only in the southwestern United States and were associated with severe drought. Absent rings were uncommon during the growing seasons that followed major volcanic eruptions, including A.D. 1259 and 1816. Because these features have occurred so rarely in high‐latitude and high‐elevation tree ring‐width records, the hypothesis that the Northern Hemisphere tree ring‐width network is compromised by dating errors due to unrecognized absent rings would require that many temperature‐limited forest stands in the network exhibited a reaction to cold temperatures that have essentially never been observed anywhere. If however absent‐ring formation were to increase in forests outside of the American Southwest, that behavior would represent an unprecedented response to environmental stress.

The value of crossdating to retain high‐frequency variability, climate signals, and extreme events in environmental proxies

“…Locally absent rings occur when an increment does not form around the full circumference of the bole in response to stressful conditions (Speer, 2010). Among datasets available through the International Tree-Ring Databank, an average 1 of 240 rings is absent, but this rate varies by species and latitude with maximum values in the southwestern United States (2% absent, on average) or in trees of the genus Pinus (0.8% absent, on average) (St George et al, 2013). This estimate may be conservative as not all investigators use the same notation to indicate absent rings in their measurement time series (St George et al, 2013).…”

“…Among datasets available through the International Tree-Ring Databank, an average 1 of 240 rings is absent, but this rate varies by species and latitude with maximum values in the southwestern United States (2% absent, on average) or in trees of the genus Pinus (0.8% absent, on average) (St George et al, 2013). This estimate may be conservative as not all investigators use the same notation to indicate absent rings in their measurement time series (St George et al, 2013). Rates can be much higher in the case of suppression or disease (Gutsell & Johnson, 2002;Black et al, 2008a).…”

A probabilistic model of chronological errors in layer-counted climate proxies: applications to annually banded coral archives

“…Equivalently, layers may be identified through observation of a seasonally or annually varying quantity such as isotopic composition (Fairbanks and Dodge, 1979). Layer-counted chronologies are assigned ages relative to a modern tie point unless supplemented by independent age controls, such as by radiometric dating (e.g., Cobb et al, 2003;Shen et al, 2013), and often assume continuous time resolution unless observations indicate otherwise (e.g., St. George et al, 2013).…”

Moisture‐driven xylogenesis in Pinus ponderosa from a Mojave Desert mountain reveals high phenological plasticity

“…scopulorum Engelm. ), which is a common dominant species in the mountain ranges of the American Southwest, respond to moisture stress by stopping radial growth, which leads to "locally absent rings" (St George, Ault, & Torbenson, 2013) but can also resume their growth during monsoonal storms, forming earlywood-type bands within the latewood called false rings or Intra Annual Density Fluctuations (IADFs; Babst et al, 2016). Isotopic composition of ponderosa pine tree rings has revealed a range of site-dependent water-use strategies with respect to the dominant climatic regime (warm-vs. cold-season precipitation; L. P. Kerhoulas, Kolb, & Koch, 2013;Leavitt, Wright, & Long, 2002;Szejner et al, 2016).…”