Abstract
Understanding spatiotemporal tree growth variability and its associations with climate can provide key insights into forest dynamics in the context of global climate change. Here, we conduct a comprehensive investigation on 64 ring-width chronologies across the entire Northwest (NW) China to understand the regional patterns of tree growth and climate–growth relationships. Using rotated principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis, we found that tree growth was mainly determined by the climate and could be classified into nine groups. Most of the tree-ring chronologies in NW China showed high correlations with moisture conditions in the current and previous growing seasons. After removing age-related growth trends, inter-annual tree growth patterns are supposed to be mainly determined by climate and climate–growth relationships. Since climate–growth relationships for most tree-ring chronologies in this arid region are similar, patterns of tree growth are mainly determined by climate variability. Within each group, the strength of the common signal increases under extreme climate conditions. Thus, climate plays a more important role in determining tree growth in extreme climate conditions relative to the non-climate factors, leading to more coherent growth patterns.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Fritz Schweingruber, Gordon Jacoby, Nicole Davi, Jan Esper, Paul Sheppard, Xuemei Shao, Neil Pederson, Qibing Zhang and some other scientists who have contributed their tree-ring data for this study. We are grateful to Rosanne D’Arrigo and Miklos Kazmer for their helpful comments. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 41001115 and 40971119), the NSFC Innovation Team Project (No. 40721061) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (lzujbky-2012-k45).
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Communicated by A. Braeuning.
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Fang, K., Gou, X., Chen, F. et al. Spatiotemporal variability of tree growth and its association with climate over Northwest China. Trees 26, 1471–1481 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00468-012-0721-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00468-012-0721-8