Climate change modulates cold-marginal forest ecosystems through changing growth constraints. Understanding spatiotemporal variations in climate-growth relationships is essential to project forest ecosystem dynamics, and climate-environmental feedbacks. We explored variations in growth and climate-growth relationships, along the Arctic margin in northwestern Europe, using Scots pine radial growth chronologies, climate data and links between the geographical origin of dominant air masses and growth-controlling variables. Analyses covered nineteenth century to early twenty-first century, with emphasis on two separate warming periods (early twentieth century, and late twentieth to early twenty-first century) and the intervening cooling period. The analyses revealed spatiotemporally unstable growth responses to climate along the Arctic margin. Spatial growth patterns were most similar during the cooling period. However, climate trends (warming, cooling) were weak drivers of growth-limiting climate variables. Instead, a transition in growth-limiting variables occurred throughout the analysed period. A wide range of growing season and non-growing season climate variables limited growth during the early twentieth century. Thereafter the number of growth-limiting variables progressively decreased. This change was accompanied by a contraction in the spatial correspondence between growth and climate, and by a shift in the geographical origin of dominant air masses. This was particularly emphasized close to the Atlantic during recent warming period. The weak association between growth-limiting variables and climate trends question projections of future ecosystem dynamics based on climate variables identified during specific periods (for example, recent warming period). Such projections may be misleading as the diversity of climate conditions constraining cold-marginal forests will be underestimated.

The length of the fire cycle is a critical factor affecting the vegetation cover in boreal and temperate regions. However, its responses to climate change remain poorly understood. We reanalyzed data from earlier studies of forest age structures at the landscape level, in order to map the evolution of regional fire cycles across Eastern North American boreal and temperate forests, following the termination of the Little Ice Age (LIA). We demonstrated a well‐defined spatial pattern of post‐LIA changes in the length of fire cycles toward lower fire activity during the 1800s and 1900s. The western section of Eastern North America (west of 77°W) experienced a decline in fire activity as early as the first half of the 1800s. By contrast, the eastern section showed these declines as late as the early 1900s. During a regionally fire‐prone period of the 1910s–1920s, forests in the western section of Eastern boreal North America burned more than forests in the eastern section. The climate appeared to dominate over vegetation composition and human impacts in shaping the geographical pattern of the post‐LIA change in fire activity. Changes in the atmospheric circulation patterns following the termination of the LIA, specifically changes in Arctic Oscillation and the strengthening of the Continental Polar Trough, were likely drivers of the regional fire dynamics.

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