Abstract
In recent years, the impact of climate change on vegetation in Qinling mountainous area has already been authenticated by numerous investigations, nevertheless, as the major ridge of Qinling Mountains as well as national natural conservation reserve, the ecology response of Mt. Taibai sub-alpine vegetation to climate change has not yet gained enough public attention.In this study, in accordance with the method of dendrochronology, response analysis was carried out to contrast characteristic parameters of tree-ring width chronologies for Larix chinensis from different elevations as well as their response pattern to climate change. The result showed that, Mean sensitivity, standard deviation and variance in first eigenvector are increasing with the rise of elevation, but the correlation coefficients (R1, R2, R3) were decreasing which indicated that the strength of the tree’s common or relative response to environment was decreasing with altitude. Precipitation had stronger correlation with the tree-ring radial growth than air temperature in both of the sites, during the growing season, trees in lower altitude had better correlation with temperature than in higher altitude, thus showing the different response to climate between the two different sites.
Highlights
Tree-ring dating, known as dendrochronology has been an important climate investigation method all over the world during the past century, climatologists regard it as a promising means to study the climate change in the past due to its high resolution of time and precise dating method [1].Through analyzing the tree-ring data could help us to understand climate behaviors and its background mechanisms in the specific region and predict the future [2,3,4,5,6]
We can infer from the curves of the public interval Residual version (RES) chronologies from the YWD and YWDZ in their common interval (Figure 2) that the chronologies have very similar variations, such as the dumps during 1913, 1963 and 1998, the humps during 1930 and 1945, since they were extracted from the same climate region
The meteorological data used in this analysis are from the Taibai weather station and Foping weather station since 1959 (Figure 3).The Taibai station lies in the northwestern side of the sample sites and the Foping station lies in the southern side of the sample sites, their major information is summarized in Table 4, they are both close to the sample sites and located in the same climate region (Table 4), so we calculated the annual
Summary
Tree-ring dating, known as dendrochronology has been an important climate investigation method all over the world during the past century, climatologists regard it as a promising means to study the climate change in the past due to its high resolution of time and precise dating method [1]. Through analyzing the tree-ring data could help us to understand climate behaviors and its background mechanisms in the specific region and predict the future [2,3,4,5,6]. In the extreme environments between the high mountains and sub-arctic zones, the climate of the forest margin is the main limiting factor of tree growth [7], previous research has shown that the relationship between tree-ring width and climate is complex [8,9]. The two sample sites of the tree coresare close to each other (3100m, 3200m) so the distinctions of the response to climate under such a situation are what we mainly care about
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