Climate-Driven Synchronized Growth of Alpine Trees in the Southeast Tibetan Plateau.

ABSTRACT: Knowledge about the spatiotemporal tree growth variability and its associations with climate provides key insights into forest dynamics under future scenarios of climate change. We synthesized 17 tree-ring width chronologies from four tree species at the high-elevation sites in the southeast Tibetan Plateau (SETP) to study the regional tree growth variability and climate-growth relationships. Despite of diverse habitats and different physiological characteristics of these species, these tree-ring chronologies shared a significant common variance in SETP. An unprecedented increase in the shared variance is found along the latter half of the 20th century, coinciding with the enhancement of the frequency of extreme rings among chronologies. It is found that minimum winter temperature tends to

SUBMITTER: Zhou F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4892591 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature