“…The most common approaches to study seasonal tree growth dynamics and wood formation phenology include the monitoring of stem-size variation (dendrometers), repeated wounding of the cambium through the pinning technique (e.g., Gričar et al, 2007) and repeated cambium sampling through microcores (e.g., Mäkinen et al, 2008;Drew and Downes, 2009;Prislan et al, 2013;Balzano et al, 2018). Among these approaches, the use of point-dendrometers has been shown to be an effective technique for recording intra-annual tree growth variability and attempts have been made to link radial variations to meteorological conditions by disentangling hydraulic stemdiameter fluctuations and biomass increments (Deslauriers et al, 2007;van der Maaten et al, 2013van der Maaten et al, , 2018Aldea et al, 2018). Although the use of daily stem variation data seems to be promising for understanding the ecology of radial growth on a fine temporal scale, its use on determining (absolute) wood formation phenology is limited, since changes in stem water content can potentially mask signals from actual cellular production (Cuny et al, 2015;Sass-Klaassen, 2015).…”