Climatic warming alters the onset, duration and cessation of the vegetative season. While prior studies have shown a tight link between thermal conditions and leaf phenology, less is known about the impacts of phenological changes on tree growth. Here, we assessed the relationships between the start of the thermal growing season (TSOS) and tree growth across the extratropical Northern Hemisphere using 3451 tree-ring chronologies and daily climatic data for 1948-2014. An earlier TSOS promoted growth in regions with high ratios of precipitation to temperature but limited growth in cold dry regions. Path analyses indicated that an earlier TSOS enhanced growth primarily by alleviating thermal limitations on wood formation in boreal forests and by lengthening the period of growth in temperate and Mediterranean forests. Semi-arid and dry subalpine forests, however, did not benefit from an earlier onset of growth and a longer growing season, presumably due to associated water loss and/or more frequent early spring frosts. These broadly relevant patterns of how climatic impacts on wood phenology affect tree growth at regional to hemispheric scales, enhance our understanding of how future phenological changes may affect the carbon sequestration capacity of extra-tropical forest ecosystems.

File naming and required software

Filenames of climatic variables (at site-level):
TSOS, GSL：cumdata_SOSEOSpeak_length_20200328.csv
SM：cumdata_SMRZ_20200328.csv
P：cumdata_precipitation_20200328.csv
GDD: cumdata_tas_5sum_20200328.csv

Filenames of gridded climatic variables:
GST: GST_GDD_mean30_1969_1998_NH20_NH90_land.nc
GSP: GSP_mean30_1969_1998_NH20_NH90_land.nc

Combined file of tree-ring data and climate data: allData20200511.csv

Pearson correlations (simple correlations are conducted in python and partial correlations are conducted in R):
code: site_to_grid.py; partial_correlation.R

Gridding the correlation coefficients of tree-ring sites onto a 2×2° raster:
code: site_to_grid.py

Dividing tree-ring sites into climatic reference regions:
shpfiles: region_shp_files (folder)

Path analysis:
code: path_analysis.R

Data Citations Data citation guideline What's data citation?

Cite as:

Liang, E., Gao, S. (2021). An earlier start of the thermal growing season enhances tree growth in cold humid areas but not in dry areas. A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles, DOI: 10.11888/Terre.tpdc.271925. CSTR: 18406.11.Terre.tpdc.271925. (Download the reference： RIS | Bibtex )

Related Literatures:

1. Gao, S., Liang, E. Y., Liu, R.S., Babst, F., Camarero, J. J., Fu, Y.S., Piao, S.L., Rossi, S., Shen, M.G., Wang, T., Peñuelas, J. (2022). An earlier start of the thermal growing season enhances tree growth in cold humid areas but not in dry areas, Nature Ecology & Evolution, 6(4): 397–404.( View Details | Bibtex)

2. Gao, S., Zhou, T., Yi, C., Shi, P., Fang, W., Liu, R., Liang, E., & Julio Camarero, J. (2020). Asymmetric impacts of dryness and wetness on tree growth and forest coverage. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 288-289, 107980. doi:10.1016/j.agrformet.2020.107980( View Details | Bibtex)

Using this data, the data citation is required to be referenced and the related literatures are suggested to be cited.

References literature

1.Zhao, S.， Pederson, N., D'Orangeville, L., HilleRisLambers, J., Boose, E., Penone, C., Bauer, B., Jiang, Y., Manzanedo, R.D. (2019). The International Tree-Ring Data Bank (ITRDB) revisited: Data availability and global ecological representativity. J. Biogeogr. 46, 355–368. (View Details )

2.Sheffield, J. , Goteti, G., Wood, E. F. (2006). Development of a 50-Year High-Resolution Global Dataset of Meteorological Forcings for Land Surface Modeling. J. Clim. 19, 3088-3111. (View Details )

Support Program

Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition Program

Copyright & License

To respect the intellectual property rights, protect the rights of data authors, expand services of the data center, and evaluate the application potential of data, data users should clearly indicate the source of the data and the author of the data in the research results generated by using the data (including published papers, articles, data products, and unpublished research reports, data products and other results). For re-posting (second or multiple releases) data, the author must also indicate the source of the original data.

License： This work is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)