Climate signal in tree-ring chronologies in a temperate climate: A multi-species approach

Abstract

Tree-rings can provide continuous yearly paleoclimatic records for regions or periods of time with no instrumental climate data. However, different species respond to different climate parameters with, for example, some sensitive to moisture and others to temperature. Here, we describe four common species growing in Northern Ireland and their suitability for climate reconstruction.Our results suggest that beech and ash are the most sensitive to climate, with tree-ring widths more strongly influenced by precipitation and soil moisture in early summer than by temperature or sunshine. Oak is also sensitive to summer rainfall, whereas Scots pine is sensitive to maximum temperature and the soil temperature.We find that the moisture-related parameters, rainfall and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), and to a lesser extent, maximum and mean temperatures, can be reconstructed. Reconstructions of climate parameters with tree-rings as proxies may be relatively stable for some seasons such as May-July. We find that combinations of species are more successful in reconstructing climate than single species.

An attempt to dendroclimatic reconstruction of winter temperature based on multispecies tree-ring widths and extreme years chronologies (example of Upper Silesia, Southern Poland)

“…Although the statistics for each model did not differ much from each other, the best results were obtained using combination of species. This result confirmed the idea and validity of using multispecies models previously proposed by Yadav et al (1997) or Garcıá-Suárez et al (2009).…”

“…However, research on past climate changes based on the use of proxies are of great importance in other regions, too. Therefore, substantial efforts have been undertaken recently to improve our understanding of climate-tree growth relationships and, as a result, obtaining better dendroclimatic estimates of past weather conditions at sites under non-limiting conditions, characterized by a mixed dendroclimatic signal, also from anthropogenically transformed ecosystems (e.g., Garcıá-Suárez et al 2009;Gea-Izquierdo et al 2011;Wettstein et al 2011;Crawford 2012). Contemporary research trends in dendroclimatology focused on the issues such as application of the multiple species with a different ecological spectrum in order to cover the greatest range of climatic variability (e.g., Garcıá-Suárez et al 2009;Trindade et al 2011), thinking of the tree-ring as an archive containing several potential proxy records of climate (total and partial ring width, density variables, microanatomical measurements, ratios of stable isotopes and the extreme values of the above) (e.g., Fritts et al 1991;Tardif and Conciatori 2006;Battipaglia et al 2010;Chen et al 2010;Hughes et al 2011), development of the methodology for climate reconstruction models (e.g., Esper et al 2005;Guiot et al 2009;Helama et al 2009;von Storch et al 2009).…”

Extreme wet conditions coincident with Bronze Age abandonment of upland areas in Britain

“…The method is extremely robust and error-free, and as a result has been used to provide precisely-dated bidecadal wood samples for the international radiocarbon calibration curve (Reimer et al, 2013). Previous studies have demonstrated that bog oaks are highly responsive to precipitation/water table levels (García-Suárez et al, 2009;Scharnweber et al, 2015). However, other work has raised the possibility that tree population data may not represent changes in hydroclimate, and instead favour the use of testate amoeba-based water table reconstructions and humification records from peatlands (Armit et al, 2014;Swindles et al, 2012).…”

Environmental control of growth variation in a boreal Scots pine stand – a data-driven approach

“…Garcia-Suarez et al 2009): air temperature and precipitation. The times of year for each variable were chosen such that they had the maximum absolute correlation alone with the response variables.…”