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...

Key message Provenance controls conductive area of stem secondary xylem, leaf area, and stable isotope (C, N, and O) ratios of beech leaves, while no significant effects were observed for ectomycorrhizal community composition. Abstract Beyond growth parameters and drought tolerance, comparatively little is known about the functioning of different beech ( Fagus sylvatica L.) provenances. We investigated properties of leaves, st...

Key message Studied beech provenances showed different patterns of inter-annual variability in mean vessel area and ring widths, indicating influence of intraspecific variability and diverse environment on hydraulic conductivity and carbon storage potential. Abstract International provenance trials of ecologically and economically important tree species are crucial to deciphering the influence of environmental factors and intr...

Despite growing interest in predicting plant phenological shifts, advanced spring phenology by global climate change remains debated. Evidence documenting either small or large advancement of spring phenology to rising temperature over the spatio‐temporal scales implies a potential existence of a thermal threshold in the responses of forests to global warming. We collected a unique data set of xylem cell‐wall‐thickening onset...

The phenology of wood formation is a critical process to consider for predicting how trees from the temperate and boreal zones may react to climate change. Compared to leaf phenology, however, the determinism of wood phenology is still poorly known. Here, we compared for the first time three alternative ecophysiological model classes ( threshold models, heat‐sum models and chilling‐influenced heat‐sum models) and an empirical...

The interaction between xylem phenology and climate assesses forest growth and productivity and carbon storage across biomes under changing environmental conditions. We tested the hypothesis that patterns of wood formation are maintained unaltered despite the temperature changes across cold ecosystems. Wood microcores were collected weekly or biweekly throughout the growing season for periods varying between 1 and 13 years dur...