Significant increases in tree mortality due to drought-induced physiological stress have been documented worldwide. This trend is likely to continue with increased frequency and severity of extreme drought events in the future. Therefore, understanding the factors that influence variability in drought responses among trees will be critical to predicting ecosystem responses to climate change and...

The developmental variation in stem height with respect to stem diameter is related to a broad range of ecological and evolutionary phenomena in trees, but the underlying genetic basis of this variation remains elusive. We implement a dynamic statistical model, functional mapping, to formulate a general procedure for the computational identification of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) that contro...

Dieback in temperate forests is understudied, despite this biome predicted to be increasingly affected by more extreme climate events a warmer world. To evaluate the potential drivers of dieback we reconstructed changes radial growth and intrinsic water-use efficiency (iWUE) from stable isotopes tree rings. Particularly, compared size, radial-growth trends, responses (temperature, precipitation...

Introduction The study of tree rings is one of the most widely used methods of climate reconstruction for centuries and millennia, but the occurrence of climatic anomalies such as global warming in recent decades has caused divergence problem in the series of tree rings in some areas. Which challenges the ability of this proxy to regenerate the climate. The “divergence problem” is the differen...

Global change challenges forest adaptability at the distributional limit of species. We studied ring-porous Quercus canariensis Willd. xylem traits to analyze how they adjust to spatio-temporal variability in climate. Trees were sampled along altitudinal transects, and annual time series of radial growth (ring width (RW)) and several earlywood vessel (EV) traits were built to analyze their rela...

It is generally expected that inter-annual changes in radial growth among trees would be similar to the increase in altitude due to the limitation of increasingly harsher climatic factors. Here, we examine whether this pattern exists in alpine forests on the southeastern Tibetan Plateau. Increment cores were collected from mature trees at the lower, middle and upper limits of balfour spruce (Pi...

Annosus root disease (ARD), is the major root disease of pines in the southeastern United States where severely affected trees exhibit growth loss. Assessing the potential damage of ARD is essential for making effective disease control and management decisions. A soil hazard rating system developed to identify potential for tree mortality is described. The Annosus Sampling Procedure accurately ...

Secondary growth results in the radial expansion of woody stems, and requires the coordination of tissue patterning, cell differentiation, and the maintenance of meristematic stem cells within the vascular cambium. Advances are being made towards describing molecular mechanisms that regulate these developmental processes, thanks in part to the application of new genetic technologies to forest t...