Climate is a primary, but non‐stationary, driver of tree growth. Climate change is altering the sensitivity of forest growth to water availability and temperature over time. It is considered that pedunculate oak ( Quercus robur L.) will cope with the changing climatic conditions in Europe in the near future. However, while species distribution models project expansion zones, they also identify reductions in occurrence at the d...

Key message Climate sensitivity of Pinus sylvestris has changed in minimum density while maximum density remains mostly stable, suggesting the use of additional density parameters could help detect response changes. Abstract As one of Eurasia's most widely distributed conifer species, Pinus sylvestris L. is frequently used in dendroclimatological reconstructions based on tree-ring width (TRW) and maximum latewood density (MXD)...

Key message The temperature sensitivity of maximum latewood density measurements in pine trees from a high-elevation site in the Spanish Pyrenees increases with tree age. Detrending modulates the intensity of the effect. Abstract Tree-rings are the prime archive for high-resolution climate information over the past two millennia. However, the accuracy of annually resolved reconstructions from tree-rings can be constrained by w...

Key message The machine learning algorithm extreme gradient boosting can be employed to address the issue of long data gaps in individual trees, without the need for additional tree-growth data or climatic variables. Abstract The susceptibility of dendrometer devices to technical failures often makes time-series analyses challenging. Resulting data gaps decrease sample size and complicate time-series comparison and integration...

Forests are essential to climate change mitigation through carbon sequestration, transpiration, and turnover. However, the quantification of climate change impacts on forest growth is uncertain and even contradictory in some regions, which is the result of spatially constrained studies. Here, we use an unprecedented network of 1.5 million tree growth records from 493 Picea abies and Pinus sylvestris stands across Europe to pre...

Correlation coefficients are widely used to identify and quantify climate signals in proxy archives. Significant relationships between tree-ring chronologies and meteorological measurements are typically applied by dendroclimatologists to distinguish between more or less relevant climate variation for ring formation. While insignificant growth-climate correlations are usually found with cold season months, we argue that weak r...

Contextualizing current increases in Northern Hemisphere temperatures is precluded by the short instrumental record of the past ca. 120 years and the dearth of temperature-sensitive proxy records, particularly at lower latitudes south of <50 °N. We develop a network of 29 blue intensity chronologies derived from tree rings of Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carrière and Picea rubens Sarg. trees distributed across the Mid-Atlantic and No...