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Journal Articles Science of the Total Environment Year : 2024

Identifying drivers of non-stationary climate-growth relationships of European beech

Christopher Leifsson
  • Function : Correspondent author
Claudia Baittinger
  • Function : Author
Banzragch Bat-Enerel
  • Function : Author
Branko Stajić
  • Function : Author
Marius Budeanu
  • Function : Author
Choimaa Dulamsuren
  • Function : Author
Balázs Garamszegi
  • Function : Author
Claudia Hartl
  • Function : Author
Weiwei Huang
  • Function : Author
Pavel Janda
  • Function : Author
Alistair Jump
  • Function : Author
Marko Kazimirović
  • Function : Author
Florian Knutzen
  • Function : Author
Jürgen Kreyling
  • Function : Author
Alexander Land
  • Function : Author
Nicolas Latte
  • Function : Author
François Lebourgeois
  • Function : Author
Christoph Leuschner
  • Function : Author
Luis Longares
  • Function : Author
Edurne Martinez del Castillo
  • Function : Author
Annette Menzel
  • Function : Author
Renzo Motta
  • Function : Author
Lena Muffler-Weigel
  • Function : Author
Paola Nola
  • Function : Author
Momchil Panayatov
  • Function : Author
Any Mary Petritan
  • Function : Author
Ion Catalin Petritan
  • Function : Author
Ionel Popa
  • Function : Author
Cǎtǎlin-Constantin Roibu
  • Function : Author
Álvaro Rubio-Cuadrado
  • Function : Author
Miloš Rydval
  • Function : Author
Tobias Scharnweber
  • Function : Author
J. Julio Camarero
  • Function : Author
Miroslav Svoboda
  • Function : Author
Elvin Toromani
  • Function : Author
Volodymyr Trotsiuk
  • Function : Author
Ernst van der Maaten
  • Function : Author
Robert Weigel
  • Function : Author
Martin Wilmking
  • Function : Author
Tzvetan Zlatanov
  • Function : Author
Anja Rammig
  • Function : Author
Christian Zang
  • Function : Author

Abstract

The future performance of the widely abundant European beech ( Fagus sylvatica L.) across its ecological amplitude is uncertain. Although beech is considered drought -sensitive and thus negatively affected by drought events, scientific evidence indicating increasing drought vulnerability under climate change on a cross -regional scale remains elusive. While evaluating changes in climate sensitivity of secondary growth offers a promising avenue, studies from productive, closed -canopy forests suffer from knowledge gaps, especially regarding the natural variability of climate sensitivity and how it relates to radial growth as an indicator of tree vitality. Since beech is sensitive to drought, we in this study use a drought index as a climate variable to account for the combined effects of temperature and water availability and explore how the drought sensitivity of secondary growth varies temporally in dependence on growth variability, growth trends, and climatic water availability across the species ' ecological amplitude. Our results show that drought sensitivity is highly variable and non -stationary, though consistently higher at dry sites compared to moist sites. Increasing drought sensitivity can largely be explained by increasing climatic aridity, especially as it is exacerbated by climate change and trees ' rank progression within forest communities, as (co -)dominant trees are more sensitive to extra -canopy climatic conditions than trees embedded in understories. However, during the driest periods of the 20th century, growth showed clear signs of being decoupled from climate. This may indicate fundamental changes in system behavior and be early -warning signals of decreasing drought tolerance. The multiple significant interaction terms in our model elucidate the complexity of European beech 's drought sensitivity, which needs to be taken into consideration when assessing this species ' response to climate change.
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Dates and versions

hal-04684844 , version 1 (03-09-2024)

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Cite

Christopher Leifsson, Allan Buras, Stefan Klesse, Claudia Baittinger, Banzragch Bat-Enerel, et al.. Identifying drivers of non-stationary climate-growth relationships of European beech. Science of the Total Environment, 2024, 937, pp.173321. ⟨10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.173321⟩. ⟨hal-04684844⟩
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