Background: Equatorward, rear-edge tree populations are natural monitors to estimate species vulnerability to climate change. According to biogeographical theory, exposition to drought events increases with increasing aridity towards the equator and the growth of southern tree populations will be...

In long-living trees, the links between individual genetic diversity and fitness are not fully understood. Yet, the lack of information on the relationships between genetic diversity and radial growth in tree populations is alarming, particularly at species distribution limits given that these...

Triggered by frequent high temperatures and scarce precipitation, droughts are a recurrent phenomenon in the Mediterranean Basin, causing significant impacts on forests. We analyzed the effects of drought intensity, duration, and seasonality on tree growth by investigating the relationship between...

Climate warming is responsible for observed reduction in snowpack depth and an earlier and faster melt-out in many mountains of the Northern Hemisphere. Such changes in mountain hydroclimate could negatively affect productivity and tree growth in high-elevation forests, but few studies have...

Wood formation is the primary biological process through which carbon is durably sequestered in woody plants, and is thus a major contributor to mitigate climate change. We analyzed the tree growth patterns of four conifer species across the Iberian Peninsula (IP) based on a dense...

Treeline ecotones are considered early-warning monitors of the effects of climate warming on terrestrial ecosystems, but it is still unclear how tree growth at treeline will track the forecasted temperature rise in these cold environments. Here, we address this issue by analysing and projecting...

The Pinus mugo complex reaches a high degree of morphologic diversity in central Europe. This morphologic diversity has been described for more than two centuries by an abundance of specific and infraspecific epithets ostensibly aimed at naming all the types of high elevation or peat-bog conifers....

Droughts are a recurrent phenomenon in the Mediterranean basin with negative consequences for society, economic activities, and natural systems. Nevertheless, the study of drought recurrence and severity in Spain has been limited so far due to the relatively short instrumental period. In this work, ...

Drought recurrence in the Mediterranean is regarded as a fundamental factor for socioeconomic development and the resilience of natural systems in context of global change. However, knowledge of past droughts has been hampered by the absence of high-resolution proxies. We present a drought...

Substantial effort has recently been put into the development of climate reconstructions from tree-ring stable carbon isotopes, though the interpretation of long-term trends retained in such timeseries remains challenging. Here we use detrended δ¹³C measurements in Pinus uncinata treerings, from...