The fundamental trade‐off between current and future reproduction has long been considered to result in a tendency for species that can grow large to begin reproduction at a larger size. Due to the prolonged time required to reach maturity, estimates of tree maturation size remain very rare and we lack a global view on the generality and the shape of this trade‐off. Using seed production from five continents, we estimate tree...

Using dendroclimatological techniques this study investigates whether inner city tree-ring width (TRW) chronologies from eight tree species (ash, beech, fir, larch, lime, sessile and pedunculate oak, and pine) are suitable to examine the urban heat island of Berlin, Germany. Climate-growth relationships were analyzed for 18 sites along a gradient of increasing urbanization covering Berlin and surrounding rural areas. As a prox...

We report the ability of an urban canopy model, coupled with a regional climate model, to simulate energy fluxes, the intra-urban variability of air temperature, urban-heat-island characteristics, indoor temperature variation, as well as anthropogenic heat emissions, in Berlin, Germany. A building energy model is implemented into the Double Canyon Effect Parametrization, which is coupled with the mesoscale climate model COSMO-...

Heat waves (HWs) are natural hazards characterised by episodes of hot weather. However, in the absence of a universal definition a wide variety of definitions is applied. In this study, ten different air temperature ( T ) based HW definitions are applied to the urban region of Berlin, Germany, to investigate and compare the occurrence and duration of HWs, and their long‐term trends from 1893 to 2017. We studied how long‐term t...

Model‐based studies on urban heat islands can be seriously affected by errors in near‐surface air temperature ( T 2), especially if errors differ between cities and their rural surroundings. Furthermore, errors in T 2 strongly depend on selected parameterisation schemes, in particular on the planetary boundary layer ( PBL ) scheme and the urban canopy model ( UCM ). We developed the Central Europe Refined analysis ( CER ), a d...

The impact of global climate change on urban relative to rural summertime air temperatures is investigated for nine major cities in Germany, under the Representative Concentration Pathway trajectory 8.5. The analysis is based on simulations of representative summers with a regional climate model ( RCM ) in conjunction with a multilayer urban parametrization when driven by three global circulation models ( GCMs ). The GCMs are...