Late 20th century warming has weakened the relationship between temperature and growth in northern forests. This loss of sensitivity to temperature, often attributed to drought stress in warmer regions of the boreal forest, has also been observed in cool, mesic environments, where warming‐related growth declines are poorly understood. We used annually resolved ring‐width and carbon stable isotope (δ 13 C) chronologies from whi...

Alpine biomes are climate change hotspots, and treeline dynamics in particular have received much attention as visible evidence of climate‐induced shifts in species distributions. Comparatively little is known, however, about the effects of climate change on alpine shrubline dynamics. Here, we reconstruct decadally resolved shrub recruitment history (age structure) through the combination of field surveys and dendroecology met...

Tree‐ring carbon and oxygen isotope ratios have been used to understand past dynamics in forest carbon and water cycling. Recently, this has been possible for different parts of single growing seasons by isolating anatomical sections within individual annual rings. Uncertainties in this approach are associated with correlated climate legacies that can occur at a higher frequency, such as across successive seasons, or a lower f...

Rising atmospheric [CO 2 ], c a , is expected to affect stomatal regulation of leaf gas‐exchange of woody plants, thus influencing energy fluxes as well as carbon (C), water, and nutrient cycling of forests. Researchers have proposed various strategies for stomatal regulation of leaf gas‐exchange that include maintaining a constant leaf internal [CO 2 ], c i , a constant drawdown in CO 2 ( c a − c i ), and a constant c i / c a...

A millennium‐long tree‐ring‐width chronology from the middle Qilian Mountains in northwestern China has been used to reconstruct annual precipitation variation (from the prior August to current July) since AD 775. The reconstruction explains 37.8% of variance of the observed data. Based on the mean and standard deviation of the reconstructed series, several prolonged severe dry and wet periods were indentified: drought spells...

We evaluated the influences of CO 2 [Control, ∼ 370 µ mol mol − 1 ; 200 µ mol mol − 1 above ambient applied by free‐air CO 2 enrichment (FACE)] and soil water (Wet, Dry) on above‐ and below‐ground responses of C 3 (cotton, G ossypium hirsutum ) and C 4 (sorghum, Sorghum bicolor ) plants in monocultures and two density mixtures. In monocultures, CO 2 enrichment increased height, leaf area, above‐ground biomass and reproductive...