November 2020

A hotter-drought fingerprint on Earth’s forest mortality sites – warming accelerates risks, especially for historical forests

Earth’s forests face grave challenges in the Anthropocene, including hotter droughts increasingly associated with widespread forest die-off. But despite the vital importance of forests to global ecosystem services, their fates in a warming world remain highly uncertain.

When the signal is the noise: Does aggregation impede prediction of forest response to climate?

Forest management aimed at promoting climate change resilience hinges on accurately quantifying the relationship between tree growth and climate. Aggregation is commonly used to upscale individual tree response (e.g., ring-width time series) to broader scales of inference, prediction, and decision-making. This approach assumes non-climatic drivers of tree growth vary randomly across a population such that their effects cancel out with replication and climate emerges as a strong predictor of aggregate tree growth.