Abstract
Concerning the ecological and economical importance of the Pearl River basin, short-term climate changes have been widely studied by using the instrumental records in the basin, but there is still a lack of long-term climatic reconstructions that can be used to evaluate the centennial scale climate anomalies. Here, we present a 237-year tree-ring width chronology from Tsuga longibracteata in the north-central Pearl River basin, with reliable coverage from 1824 to 2016. Based on the significant relationship between tree growth and mean temperature from the previous March to the previous October, we reconstructed the previous growing season (pMar-pOct) temperatures for the past 193 years, with an explained variance of 43.3% during 1958–2016. The reconstruction reveals three major warm (1857–1890, 1964–1976, and 1992–2016) and cold (1824–1856, 1891–1963, and 1977–1991) periods during 1824–2016. Comparison with other temperature sensitive proxy records from nearby regions suggests that our reconstruction is representative of large-scale temperature variations. Significant correlations of tree growth with the sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the western Pacific Ocean, northern Indian Ocean, and Atlantic Ocean suggest that SST variability in these domains may have strongly influenced the growing season temperature change in the Pearl River basin.
Highlights
As carbon sinks, forests play a key role in land-atmosphere carbon dioxide exchanges under global warming, providing vital ecological services [1,2,3]
We developed a ring-width chronology of T. longibracteata from 1780 to 2016 in the north-central Pearl River basin
Multi-year and multi-decadal signals can be found during the reliable period of the chronology (1824–2016), based on the wavelet power spectrum analysis of the chronology
Summary
Forests play a key role in land-atmosphere carbon dioxide exchanges under global warming, providing vital ecological services [1,2,3]. A changing climate could have detrimental impacts on forest ecosystems. Increasing drought stress could have major negative impacts on the water-limited primary forests of the Croatian Dinaric mountains [4]. For subtropical coniferous forests in the south-eastern United States, increasing water availability after short-term summer drought could significantly affect ecosystem phenological processes by extending the growing season [5]. Heat-induced drought and other disturbances such as wildfires could limit forest growth and even trigger widespread tree mortality, thereby shifting this important terrestrial carbon sink into a carbon source [7,8,9]. It is increasingly important to understand the climate impacts on various tree species in diverse forests under a rapidly changing climate
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