The interpretation of stable isotopes in a dendroecological framework can provide powerful insights into how trees adjust physiologically in response to the environment. This symposium aims to bring together researchers who use stable isotopes in tree rings to address ecophysiological responses to environmental changes from intra-annual to multi-decadal resolution. We hope this symposium will enable fruitful discussions and new ideas a...

The ability of forests to continue absorbing atmospheric CO2, and hence mitigating climate change, depends on the extent to which their productivity is limited by nutrients, with nitrogen (N) being particularly important in temperate and boreal regions. Fertilisation experiments offer an opportunity to directly determine whether atmospheric N input can contribute to alleviating N limitation. However, the majority of the experiments have normally considered soil N applications, which do not...

During the 21st century, the boreal biome has warmed at rates 3-4 times the global average, impacting forests directly through changes in temperature and precipitation and indirectly through acceleration of disturbances including permafrost thaw and wildfire. Despite this, little is known about the ability of boreal trees to adapt in the face of such rapid environmental changes. Warming-induced growth rate increases are predicted for the boreal biome, but these would be largely dependent o...

Forest disturbances and tree growth are major drivers of dynamics and long-term carbon storage in forests. Combining forest inventory data and tree-ring analysis allows for a retrospective estimate of aboveground forest biomass (AGB) and disturbance dynamics at decadal to centennial scales, both being directly related to net primary productivity (NPP). We used this combined approach to estimate precisely-dated ages of aboveground carbon in over 20 temperate old-growth forests in Western Eu...

The past and future of forests are unequivocally controlled and determined by global climate. Constraining the uncertainties within this multifaceted relationship has been the focus of vast research efforts. A spatial perspective, however, is often neglected. Using the geographical constraints (e.g. latitude, altitude) and climatic drivers of tree dynamics as a benchmark, we address the spatial patterns and changes of forest growth at a continental scale and quantify the forest growth resp...

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...

Dendroclimatic reconstructions play a key role in contextualizing recent climate change by improving our understanding of past climate variability. The climatically-sensitive blue intensity (BI) parameter is gaining prominence as a more accessible alternative to X-ray densitometry. Yet accurately representing low-frequency trends and high-frequency extremes using scanner-based BI remains a challenge due to color biases and resolution limitations. As part of the REPLICATE project, methodolo...

Improving our understanding of the carbon cycle is key to addressing the challenges of climate change. In this study, we investigated the relationships between intra and inter-annual climate variations, carbon fluxes, and the xylem biomass in an 80-year plantation of Pinus strobus at Turkey Point, Ontario, Canada. From eddy covariance tower, we obtained daily Gross Primary Production (GPP), precipitation and air temperature for the period 2003-2018. To determine inter-and intra-annual xyle...

Leaf water isotopic enrichment (ΔD[LW]) is the original source of climatic information stored in tree-ring δ¹⁸O and δD. Tree-ring δ¹⁸O temporal variability has been correlated to environmental variables such as temperature, precipitation, relative humidity (RH), and phenomena such as tropical cyclones and drought. Meanwhile, more development is needed to use tree-ring δD temporal variability as a paleoclimatic bioindicator. An increased understanding of the climatic signal of ΔD[LW] could ...

Global warming in boreal forests is more pronounced than elsewhere, as temperature is increasing twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Low water availability in some boreal forest stands is one of the numerous consequences of increasing temperature. Sites with coarse surficial deposits where water drains fast are more vulnerable to water stress, such as sites on esker fluvioglacial deposits. The eskers of the Abitibi region of Quebec (Canada) are valuable ecosystem for wood provision an...

The ongoing North American megadrought has persisted since the year 2000, and has been characterized by anomalously low amounts of winter and summer precipitation. The climate systems providing these seasonal precipitation regimes are distinct in their origins but overlapping in their geographic ranges. However, our understanding is still incomplete in how alternation in water resources influences forest growth and physiology during extreme and persistent drought, including whether replete...

Insect and pathogen outbreaks, fires, hurricanes, severe drought and other disturbances alter the structure, composition and function of forests. Results from silvicultural experiments suggest disturbances in lower density forests lead to better mitigation of drought stress for surviving trees than those in higher density stands. As drought and insect and pathogen outbreaks are expected to become more severe and frequent, understanding how surviving trees’ climatic response is affected by ...

In the 1970s, forest geneticists with the British Columbia Forest Service established a number of long-term provenance trials throughout the province. The Trinity Valley (TV) provenance trial was established in 1975 in the southern interior to evaluate interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca) across the species’ range. TV is a factorial experiment, where 64 populations of 4 year-old Douglas-fir seedlings were planted in a randomized complete-block design with three replicat...

Rapidly warming climate affects water availability for boreal conifer species, thus urging the need for assessing their adaptive capacity to better predict forest vulnerability and resilience under drier climates. In this study, we first used a dendroecological approach to determine the level of climate sensitivity of white spruce (Picea glauca [Moench] Voss) trees grown in a provenance-family common garden. We detected a clear signal of local genetic adaptation to drought, with provenance...

"Drought legacy effects (DLE) in radial tree growth (RTG) have been extensively studied over the last decade and are found to critically influence carbon sequestration in woody biomass. However, the statistical significance of DLE depends on our definition of expected vs. unexpected growth variability, a definition that has not received sufficient scrutiny.Here, we revisit popular DLE analyses using the ITRDB and employ a synthetic data simulation to disentangle four key factors influe...

(by bus, max 92 people)Designed for visitors and newcomers, the tour is based on the pleasure...