Abstract
Abstract The response of trees to intra‐annual environmental constraints varies temporally throughout a growing season and spatially across landscapes. A better understanding of these dynamics will help us anticipate the impacts of short‐term climate variability and medium‐term climate change on forests. Using the process‐based 3‐PG forest ecosystem model, we assessed the spatial manifestation and seasonal variation in environmental constraints [vapour pressure deficit (VPD), air temperature and soil water availability] on tree growth for the potential distribution range of seven widespread Central European tree species. We focused our analyses on Switzerland, where large climatic gradients occur within a comparatively small geographic area. On average, over the last 60 years, simulated forest growth during the May–August growing season was limited by high VPD (67% of the forested area), low air temperature (29%) or low soil water availability (4%). But this response varied among species and across elevations. When comparing the period 1961–1990 with 1991–2018, we observed major shifts from former temperature limitation to recent VPD limitation across 12% of the area (3%–25%, depending on species), mainly at mid‐elevations (700–1,200 m a.s.l.). At the same time, forest growth at lower elevations (i.e. below 700 m a.s.l.) became more limited by available soil water at the end of the growing season. Synthesis. Our results highlight how the relative impact of environmental growth constraints has shifted in the last three decades, and show that the importance of VPD as a dominant environmental growth constraint has increased for tree species in Swiss and Central European forests. Understanding the spatial and temporal variability in environmental growth constraints will help to generate accurate species‐specific risk maps for forest managers to identify areas with elevated drought and heat stress in the near future.
Highlights
Phase separation is a fundamental phenomenon observed in various branches of materials science, from superconductors to soft matter.[1]
The process of liquid–liquid crystalline phase separation (LLCPS) in filamentous colloids is at the very core of multiple biological, physical and technological processes of broad significance
Phase separation involving only one hydrocolloid component can occur on a purely entropic basis when the colloid is of filamentous type and has a large associated excluded volume. We refer to this type of 1-component liquid– liquid phase separation as liquid–liquid crystalline phase separation (LLCPS) to fundamentally distinguish it from the liquid–liquid phase separation (LLPS) introduced above
Summary
Phase separation is a fundamental phenomenon observed in various branches of materials science, from superconductors to soft matter.[1]. Paper volumes.[13,14,15] This becomes significant when the filamentous colloid building blocks are chiral, with macroscopic chirality of the droplets emerging during growth and leading to the formation of chiral nematic (or cholesteric) tactoidal droplets.[16,17,18] The shape of these classes of tactoids has already been rationalized by the interaction between confinement, anisotropic surface energy, and Frank–Oseen elastic energy.[19,20] To date, several thermodynamic, structural and kinetic aspects of this LLCPS process remain still unclear, such as the nature of the transitions between the different configurations, the dynamics of the growth process, and the change in cholesteric periodicity (pitch) observed with increasing volumes of the droplets This latter effect has been observed experimentally in different chiral systems,[18,21] and requires a more refined analysis to be explained, since the confinement effects are not sufficient to elucidate this phenomenon.
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