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  • Analyzing asymmetries in the response of European beech to precipitation anomalies in various stand and site conditions using decadal diameter censuses
    Trifković, Vasilije ; Bončina, Andrej ; Ficko, Andrej
    In temperate forests, precipitation-productivity relationships have usually been considered linear and symmetric, i.e. under conditions of nominal precipitation variability, trees are able to ... compensate for reduced growth during dry extremes with increased growth during wet extremes. However, under severely dry/wet conditions tree responses may be nonlinear and asymmetrical. Forest inventory data and standardized drought indexes such as the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) can be used to test for asymmetries in the relationship between aboveground net primary production and precipitation. Based on forest inventory data from Slovenia (51,734 plots, 365,885 individual tree measurements in the period 1992-2013), we estimated the effect of precipitation anomalies on the diameter increment of European beech in various climatic, site and stand conditions. Beech responds asymmetrically to precipitation anomalies even under moderately variable precipitation. An individual tree growth model with 3 tree, 5 stand, 6 site and 4 climate variables explaining 32.6% of the total variance suggests that growth reductions in extremely dry periods are 3.0 times greater than growth increases in extremely wet periods. A comparison of 108 natural cubic spline tree diameter models shows that giving more weight to more extreme deviations from average summer precipitation explains significantly more variance compared to using the average SPI in the summers between the two censuses. We conclude that negative asymmetry can be detected on a temporal scale of a decade with much coarser data than tree-ring chronologies. However, even under |SPI| > 1.5 and a negative trend in the SPI on 60% of the plots at an average rate of -0.2/year, precipitation anomalies contributed < 1% to the diameter increment compared to stand (57%) and site (4%) factors. At the same magnitude of climate anomalies and the same stand density and levels of competition, beech is expected to grow better in structurally and compositionally diverse stands.
    Source: Agricultural and forest meteorology. - ISSN 0168-1923 (Vol. 327, art. 109195, 2022, 15 str.)
    Type of material - article, component part
    Publish date - 2022
    Language - english
    COBISS.SI-ID - 128324355

    Link(s):

    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2022.109195
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168192322003823?via%3Dihub
    Repository of the University of Ljubljana – RUL
    DOI

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