With ongoing global warming, increasing water deficits promote physiological stress on forest ecosystems with negative impacts on tree growth, vitality, and survival. How individual tree species will react to increased drought stress is therefore a key research question to address for carbon accounting and the development of climate change mitigation strategies. Recent tree‐ring studies have shown that trees at higher latitude...

Climatically controlled allocation to reproduction is a key mechanism by which climate influences tree growth and may explain lagged correlations between climate and growth. We used continent‐wide datasets of tree‐ring chronologies and annual reproductive effort in Fagus sylvatica from 1901 to 2015 to characterise relationships between climate, reproduction and growth. Results highlight that variable allocation to reproduction...

Biogeographical and ecological theory suggests that species distributions should be driven to higher altitudes and latitudes as global temperatures rise. Such changes occur as growth improves at the poleward edge of a species distribution and declines at the range edge in the opposite or equatorial direction, mirrored by changes in the establishment of new individuals. A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that such proc...