Abstract
In recent years, the utility of earlywood vessels anatomical characteristics in identifying and reconstructing hydrological conditions has been fully recognized. In riparian ring-porous species, flood rings have been used to identify discrete flood events, and chronologies developed from cross-sectional lumen areas of earlywood vessels have been used to successfully reconstruct seasonal discharge. In contrast, the utility of the earlywood vessel chronologies in non-riparian habitats has been less compelling. No studies have contrasted within species their earlywood vessel anatomical characteristics, specifically from trees that are inversely exposed to flooding. In this study, earlywood vessel and ring-width chronologies were compared between flooded and non-flooded control Fraxinus nigra trees. The association between chronologies and hydroclimate variables was also assessed. Fraxinus nigra trees from both settings shared similar mean tree-ring width but floodplain trees did produce, on average, thicker earlywood. Vessel chronologies from the floodplain trees generally recorded higher mean sensitivity (standard deviation) and lower autocorrelation than corresponding control chronologies indicating higher year-to-year variations. Principal components analysis (PCA) revealed that control and floodplain chronologies shared little variance indicating habitat-specific signals. At the habitat level, the PCA indicated that vessel characteristics were strongly associated with tree-ring width descriptors in control trees whereas, in floodplain trees, they were decoupled from the width. The most striking difference found between flood exposures related to the chronologies' associations with hydroclimatic variables. Floodplain vessel chronologies were strongly associated with climate variables modulating spring-flood conditions as well as with spring discharge whereas control ones showed weaker and few consistent correlations. Our results illustrated how spring flood conditions modulate earlywood vessel plasticity. In floodplain F. nigra trees, the use of earlywood vessel characteristics could potentially be extended to assess and/or mitigate anthropogenic modifications of hydrological regimes. In absence of major recurring environmental stressors like spring flooding, our results support the idea that the production of continuous earlywood vessel chronologies may be of limited utility in dendroclimatology.
Highlights
In recent decades, developments in tree-ring research have facilitated the quantification of the anatomical traits of treering and contributed to the promotion of wood anatomical research
Width variables (EW, latewood width (LW), and ring width (RW)) had higher mean sensitivity and standard deviation values in control chronologies compared with the floodplain (Table 1)
LW and RW in control trees recorded the highest values for variance accounted for by the first principal component (PC1), the expressed population signal (EPS), and the mean intertree correlation
Summary
Developments in tree-ring research have facilitated the quantification of the anatomical traits of treering and contributed to the promotion of wood anatomical research. Methodological reviews and recipe-type publications have contributed to systematize many procedures (García-González and Fonti, 2006, 2008; Fonti et al, 2009a, 2010; Scholz et al, 2013; Gärtner et al, 2015b; García-González et al, 2016; von Arx et al, 2016). Tree rings and their intra-annual anatomical variations form important environmental archives. The current discussion surrounding light rings (macroscopic) and blue rings (microscopic) [see Crivellaro et al (2018) and Tardif et al (2020)] echoes the recent developments and applications of detailed wood anatomical research in dendrochronology
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