Models of tree growth responses to climate variability provide insight about the potential effects of global warming on forests. Using a unique dataset containing tree ringwidth measurements from all trees (>4 cm in diameter at breast height) in 1ha plots, we modelled time series of annual basal area increment (BAI) in subalpine forests of western Canada, which are expected to be highly sensitive to the effects of global warming. Our objective was to determine how BAI responses to inter...

MAIDENiso is a numerical process-based model that allows researchers to simulate the growth of a virtual tree. Using daily meteorological data, the model simulates the physical and physiological processes taking place in the tree and its environment, to produce daily and yearly outputs comparable to dendrological observations. The model has been adapted and used successfully in boreal regions in North America. In an inverse mode, tree-ring obs...

Climate change poses an existential threat to trees, given our understanding of the importance of climate in shaping their geographic distributions. Climate envelope models are commonly used to predict how species will respond to climate change. These models give rise to the leading edge-trailing edge paradigm for range change: populations at the cool edge of a species’ distribution are expected to benefit from warming, whereas populations at the warm edge are expected to decline. We chall...

Forest responses to climate change are highly uncertain, but critical for forecasting and managing forest carbon dynamics. Tree-ring time series data provide annually resolved growth responses to climate, but often lack the stand-level information needed to scale growth up to carbon uptake. In contrast, the U. S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program is an exceptional spatial network to estimate forest carbon, but lacks the annual resolution needed to determine how tre...

Growing concerns about vulnerabilities of boreal forests to climate change and disturbances warrants additional information about their impacts on the growth of dominant tree species in different surrounding environments. To address these concerns, we investigated how the surrounding environment influences the growth of such trees and their responses to climate and insect epidemics in stands of eastern Canada’s boreal forest. For this, we focused on 96 black spruce, jack pine, and tremblin...

Ultra high resolution imaging is becoming standard across the sciences and must be a priority for dendrochronology. Large format scanners fail to resolve micro rings and the anatomical structures of increasing scientific interest. Meanwhile, current software limitations include cost, user experience, data management flexibility, and capacity for handling large file sizes. We argue for a new paradigm and present a technology framework that integrates gigapixel macro photography, a cloud-hos...

Tree-ring research has given generations of scientists a long memory of what is acceptable for a tree to be included for data analysis. The established criteria, however, were set through purposeful goals to maximize the response for climatic reconstructions. Ecology is different. Tree-rings are increasingly being used to study a wide swath of ecology, including the carbon cycle or the response of ecosystems to global changes. A fundamental aspect of ecology is to understand the range of r...

In the context of climate and environmental change, the boreal forest is subject to potential changes in structure and function. Stand-level physiological models can be used to predict these responses over time and to understand the interaction between tree ecophysiological processes and climate variability. We present here a project that aims to develop potential growth scenarios for Canadian boreal forest stands based on the characterization of their ecosystem fluxes using the MAIDEN mod...

The global rise in temperature and associated changes in climate have led to decline of forests around the globe. A particularly severe example of this is yellow-cedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis) decline along the coast of British Columbia and Alaska, where anthropogenic climate change has led to reduced insulating snowpack, leaving yellow-cedar roots vulnerable to thaw-freeze events, resulting in freezing damage to roots and water stress during the subsequent growing season. Yellow-cedar ...

Dendrochronology is considered one the most precise of all the scientific dating techniques. However, it requires long sequences of tree rings and a master record for both the species and region in question. At the University of Groningen, we have been pioneering a new approach to dating that combines the precision of dendrochronology with the versatility of radiocarbon dating. It relies on the detection of spikes in the annual radiocarbon record, thought to b...

Current and projected changes in climate are estimated to be from 10 to 100 times faster than the natural adaptive capacity of trees whose generation times are long. As extreme climatic events are becoming more frequent and exert a strong selection pressure on tree populations, there is an urgent need to better characterize the genetic variability involved in the response of trees to climate. There is currently a lack of knowledge on the role of genetic variability in tolerance to climatic...

Treeline ecotones at high latitudes and high elevations are generally temperature-limited environments. However, there is evidence that temperature control on tree growth has recently decreased at treelines due to climate change, while water availability is increasingly reported as a seasonally important growth-limiting factor. Analyzing climate-growth responses at intra-annual (wood cell) level can help unravel these complex patterns, but long time series of wood formation data are often ...

Trees exhibit different growth rates and timings of wood formation. However, the factors explaining these differences remain undetermined, making samplings and estimations of the growth dynamics a complicated task based on technical rather than statistical reasons. We collected weekly wood microcores in 159 balsam firs (Abies balsamea (L.) Mill.) from April to October 2018. We tested spatial autocorrelation, tree size, and cell production rates as explanatory variables of xylem phenology, ...