No abstract

<p>The ‘growing season’ of trees is often assumed to be coupled with climatology (e.g., summer vs winter) and visual canopy phenology cues (e.g., leaf emergence in spring and senescence in autumn). However, green leaves are not always photosynthetically active and actual tree radial growth via cambial cell division is ‘invisible’ since it is hard to see and occurs at micrometer resolution. Therefore, despite the presence of apparently green vegetation, trees may not be assimilating carbon or growing. Here, we study photosynthesis and tree-growth at near-instantaneous timescales using <em>in-situ</em> and satellite remote sensing, point dendrometers, quantitative wood anatomy, and Pulse Amplitude Modulated chlorophyll fluorescence. Tree and leaf-level measurements are being made on eight oak (<em>Quercus spp.</em>) trees in a temperate forest in southern New York, USA. We find that oak trees commence radial growth in the first week of April approximately one-month prior to canopy development that is not completed until the first week of May. Additionally, the development of foliar photosynthetic capacity lags leaf expansion by nearly two weeks. Further, we find that oak growth for the season is completed by late July while photosynthetic activity is maintained for three additional months until early November. Finally, we examine the growth climate sensitivity across a network of 16 oak tree-ring width chronologies distributed across the northeastern US. These relationships suggest that oak earlywood growth relies on carbon assimilated in prior year autumn while oak latewood relies on current year assimilated carbon. Therefore, photosynthesis and tree-growth in Northeastern US oaks occurs asynchronously, since trees don’t reach peak photosynthetic performance the moment leaves emerge or grow through the ‘growing season’.</p>

Intra-Annual Density Fluctuations (IADFs) are an important wood functional trait that determine trees’ ability to adapt to climatic changes. Here, we use a large tree-ring database of 11 species from 89 sites across eight European countries, covering a climatic gradient from the Mediterranean to northern Europe, to analyze how climate variations drive IADF formation. We found that IADF occurrence increases nonlinearly with ring width in both gymnosperms and angiosperms and decreases with altitude and age. Recently recorded higher mean annual temperatures facilitate the formation of IADFs in almost all the studied species. Precipitation plays a significant role in inducing IADFs in species that exhibit drought tolerance capability, and a growth pattern known as bimodal growth. Our findings suggest that species with bimodal growth patterns growing in western and southern Europe will form IADFs more frequently, as an adaptation to increasing temperatures and droughts.