Abstract
Humid subtropical China is an “oasis” relative to other dry subtropics of the world due to the prevailing of the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM). Although many long climate sensitive tree-rings have been published to understand the historical climate change over various regions in China, long tree-ring chronologies in humid subtropical China are rare due to the difficulty to find old growth trees. This study established a tree-ring chronology spanning from 1776 to 2016 from Cryptomeria fortunei Hooibrenk ex Otto et Dietr in Liancheng area of humid subtropical China, which is also currently the longest chronology in Fujian province. Similar to the climate-growth relationships in neighboring regions, our tree-ring chronology is limited by cold temperature in winter and spring and drought in summer. In addition, a drought stress before the growing season also played a role in limiting the growth of our tree rings. Our climate sensitive tree rings showed different correlations with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) in different periods, possibly via modulation of the EASM.
Highlights
Understanding the effect of regional climate variability on forest ecosystems in the past can shed light on how current climate change impacts will affect forests in the future [1,2,3,4]
We further investigated the responses of tree rings to Standardized Precipitation and Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) on different timescales (Figure 5)
This study presents a tree-ring chronology of Cryptomeria fortunei in the Liancheng area spanning
Summary
Understanding the effect of regional climate variability on forest ecosystems in the past can shed light on how current climate change impacts will affect forests in the future [1,2,3,4]. Various studies have been conducted on climate change and its impact on the forest dynamics of this area [2]. Due to the relatively limited number of climate proxies from this region there are few paleoclimate studies able to place the recent climate change and forest dynamics in any significant, long-term perspective. Tree-rings are the most widely used proxy for climate reconstruction of the past millennium due their accurate dating, high climate sensitivity and high spatiotemporal resolution [6,7,8].
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