Climate change evidence in tree growth and stand productivity at the upper treeline ecotone in the Polar Ural Mountains

Background:Recent warming is affecting species composition and species areal distribution of many regions.However,although most treeline studies have estimated the rates of forest expansion into tundra,still little is known about the long-term dynamic of stand productivity at the forest-tundra intersection.Here,we make use of tree-ring data from 350 larch(Larix sibirica Ledeb.)and spruce(Picea obovata Ledeb.)sampled along the singular altitudinal treeline ecotone at the Polar Urals to assess the dynamic of stand establishment and productivity,and link the results with meteorological observations to identify the main environmental drivers.Results:The analysis of stand instalment indicated that more than 90%of the living trees appeared after 1900.During this period,the stand became denser and moved 50m upward,while in recent decades the trees of both species grew faster.The maximum afforestation occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century,and the large number of encountered saplings indicates that the forest is still expanding.The upward shift coincided with a slight increase of May-August and nearly doubling of September-April precipitation while the increase in growth matched with an early growth season warming(June+0.27°C per decade since 1901).This increase in radial growth combined with the stand densification led to a 6-90 times increase of biomass since 1950.Conclusion:Tree-ring based twentieth century reconstruction at the treeline ecotone shows an ongoing forest densification and expansion accompanied by an increased growth.These changes are driven by climate change mechanism,whereby the leading factors are the significant increase in May-June temperatures and precipitation during the dormant period.Exploring of phytomass accumulation mechanisms within treeline ecotone is valuable for improving our understanding of carbon dynamics and the overall climate balance in current treeline ecosystems and for predicting how these will be altered by global change.

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

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~℃, 5 days earlier than it did in the beginning of the 20 th 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.