[COLLOQUE] GENTREE Final Conference 27-31 January 2020 séance 11

GENTREE Final Conference :

Elisabet MARTÍNEZ SANCHO - WSL Birmensdorf · Switzerland

GENTREE Final Conference 'Genetics to the rescue - managing forests sustainably in a changing environment'

27-31 January 2020, Avignon, France

http://www.gentree-h2020.eu/

Elisabet MARTÍNEZ SANCHO - WSL Birmensdorf · Switzerland : Treegrowth sensitivity to climate change: disentangling the role ofclimate determinism and site-specific characteristics

Climate space constrains the multidimensional climatic conditions ofthe geographic area where a given species occurs.

Under ongoingclimate change, the species-specific shapes of climate spaces aredynamically adjusting to the fast shifts towards generally warmer anddrier conditions.

This also means that certain climatic combinationswill disappear and new ones will emerge within the habitatdistribution of most species.

With their long temporal scale and hightemporal resolution, tree-rings series offer the opportunity toretrospectively assess the temporal dynamics of climatic growthlimitations. In this study, we aim at identifying putativelyvulnerable regions under future climate scenarios by i) assessing thegeneral patterns of tree sensitivity to seasonal climate within thespecies’ climate spaces, and ii) disentangling the contribution oflarge-scale climate and site-specific characteristics on treeresponse.

A compilation of tree-ring series obtained from the H2020project GenTree and the International Tree-Ring Data Bank (in total >800 sites across Europe) was used in order to cover a wide spectrumof the climate spaces of four tree species with distinct ecologicalrequirements: Fagus sylvatica, Picea abies, Pinus sylvestris, andQuercus petraea.

Tree-ring series were disassembled from theirinherent temporal scale and reordered according to annual droughtconditions.

Moving window correlations between these newly-builttree-ring series and seasonal temperature and precipitation wereperformed for the period 1960-1990, and were placed within theclimate space of the species to identify general patterns of treeresponses.

Linear mixed models were applied to elucidate whether ornot tree vulnerability to climate at a given position in climatespace is strongly modified by site-specific characteristics.

Thefindings highlight the spatiotemporal changes in tree growthsensitivity, providing new insights into forest vulnerability underscenarios of climate change.