Publications by authors named "Luis A Longares"
With ongoing global warming, increasing water deficits promote physiological stress on forest ecosystems with negative impacts on tree growth, vitality, and survival. How individual tree species will react to increased drought stress is therefore a key research question to address for carbon accounting and the development of climate change mitigation strategies. Recent tree-ring studies have shown that trees at higher latitudes will benefit from warmer temperatures, yet this is likely highly species-dependent and less well-known for more temperate tree species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA new high-resolution climatic gridded dataset was built for Aragón (northeast Spain) using a large collection of daily precipitation and temperature observations from more than 3000 weather stations. The grid covers, at the unprecedented spatial resolution of 0.25 km, daily maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation in the 1950-2020 period.
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- The future performance of European beech trees is uncertain due to their sensitivity to drought, and there is limited understanding of how climate change impacts their drought vulnerability across different regions.
- The study uses a drought index to analyze how drought sensitivity of beech’s secondary growth varies over time, revealing that sensitivity is higher in dry environments and can be influenced by climatic conditions as well as tree competition within forests.
- Results indicate that during severe droughts, beech growth may become less connected to climatic factors, suggesting a potential decline in drought tolerance and highlighting the complexity of the species' response to climate change.
Tree-ring data has been widely used to inform about tree growth responses to drought at the individual scale, but less is known about how tree growth sensitivity to drought scales up driving changes in forest dynamics. Here, we related tree-ring growth chronologies and stand-level forest changes in basal area from two independent data sets to test if tree-ring responses to drought match stand forest dynamics (stand basal area growth, ingrowth, and mortality). We assessed if tree growth and changes in forest basal area covary as a function of spatial scale and tree taxa (gymnosperm or angiosperm).
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- The growth of beech trees (Fagus sylvatica) has been negatively impacted by climate variability, showing declines in recent decades across a large geographic range.* -
- Models predict that by 2090, growth could decrease by 20% to over 50%, particularly in southern regions where drought conditions are expected to worsen due to climate change.* -
- These anticipated declines in forest productivity pose significant ecological and economic risks, highlighting the urgent need for adaptive strategies in forest management.*
Article Synopsis
- Forecasted increases in drought frequency and severity may lead to declines in forest productivity globally, with species responses influenced by their functional traits.
- The study analyzed forest resilience to drought using tree-ring width data and satellite imagery across 11 tree species and 502 forests in Spain, revealing that TRWi data offers more sensitivity to forest resilience than NDVI data.
- Results showed that evergreen gymnosperms in semi-arid Mediterranean forests had lower resistance but higher recovery potential compared to deciduous angiosperms in humid temperate areas, suggesting that increased drought frequency could limit recovery capabilities, especially for species in drier environments.
Climate predictions for the Mediterranean Basin include increased temperatures, decreased precipitation, and increased frequency of extreme climatic events (ECE). These conditions are associated with decreased tree growth and increased vulnerability to pests and diseases. The anatomy of tree rings responds to these environmental conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWood formation in European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) was intra-annually monitored to examine plastic responses of the xylem phenology according to altitude in one of the southernmost areas of their distribution range, i.
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