Monday, August 6, 2018: 4:40 PM
346-347, New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
Flurin Babst1,2, Paul Bodesheim3, Noah D. Charney4, Andrew Friend5, Martin Girardin6, Stefan Klesse7, David J.P. Moore8, Kristina Seftigen9, Jesper Björklund1, Olivier Bouriaud10, Andria Dawson11, R. Justin DeRose12, Michael C. Dietze13, Annemarie Eckes5, Brian Enquist14, David C. Frank15, Miguel Mahecha16, Benjamin Poulter17, Sydne Record18, Valerie Trouet7, Rachael Turton5, Zhen Zhang19 and Margaret E. K. Evans15, (1)Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland, (2)Department of Ecology, W. Szafer Institute of Botany, Polish Academy of Science, Krakow, Poland, (3)Biogeochemistry, Max Planck Institute, Jena, Germany, (4)Harvard Forest, Harvard University, Petersham, MA, (5)Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, (6)Modeling and Forest Productivity, Canadian Forest Service, Quebec, Canada, (7)Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, (8)School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, (9)Dendro Sceinces Group, Swiss Federal Research Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland, (10)Faculty of Forestry, Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Suceava, Romania, (11)Mount Royal University, Calgary, AB, Canada, (12)Forest Inventory and Analysis, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Ogden, UT, (13)Earth and Environment, Boston University, Boston, MA, (14)Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, (15)Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, (16)Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany, (17)Biospheric Sciences Laboratory (Code 618), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, (18)Biology, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, (19)Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Background/Question/Methods The demand for extensive empirical data on forest growth and its climate sensitivity is growing rapidly with continued anthropogenic warming of the Earth. In principal, tree-ring records are the only resource that can provide such information along large environmental gradients and over sub-annual to centennial time scales. Yet, global tree-ring archives have remained an underrepresented resource in Earth system science. Some of the major challenges that complicate the use of existing tree-ring archives in environmental change research include: i) their limited spatial representativity for global forests, ii) varying sampling schemes that often preclude absolute estimates of forest growth, iii) different spatial and temporal resolution compared to remotely sensed and in-situ Earth observations, and iv) uncertainties arising when past climate-growth relationships are extrapolated into the future.
Results/Conclusions
Here we provide a perspective on possible solutions to these issues that emerged from recent and ongoing work. Regarding existing tree-ring networks, we show how spatial interpolation, statistical scaling, and mechanistic modeling may improve their spatiotemporal coverage. An option to account for non-climatic (e.g. CO2) effects in projections of changing climate-growth relationships is also presented. Regarding future research avenues, we advocate for intensified data collection in warm regions, improved coordination with Earth observation networks, and refined concepts to integrate tree-ring data with computational estimates of forest productivity. Such efforts are expected to elevate tree-ring data as an essential component in Earth system science.
