Latitudinal and temporal shifts in the radial growth-climate response of Siberian larch in the Polar Urals

Abstract

This paper presents a dendroclimatic analysis of Siberian larch trees sampled along a latitudinal 260-km transect located in the Polar Urals, Russia. Three standardised chronologies were built over a length of 230–293 years using 79 individual tree-ring chronologies collected in the southern, middle and northern parts of the Polar Urals. Bootstrapped correlation functions showed that the annual growth of the larches was mainly influenced by the air temperatures in June and July. The relative role of the temperatures increased from south to north. Daily air temperature data analysis revealed that the duration of the growing season in the northern part of the Polar Urals is 24 days less than that in the southern part. At the present time, air temperatures exceeded threshold of 8°C, 5 days earlier than it did in the beginning of the 20th century. In response to the increase in the duration of the growing season and the changing winter conditions in the Polar Urals over the last 130 years, radial growth–temperature relationships in larches have weakened; this effect was strongly pronounced in the southern part of the Polar Urals.