Growth/climate relationships in tree-ring widths of picea abies in Lithuania and Poland

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to generalise the climate - growth response of spruce on the selected sites in natural stands of Poland and Lithuania where climatic conditions and biogeographical differences are expressed in terms of the influences of oceanic and continental climates. For this purpose almost 2,000 cores were taken from 92 sites (10-30 trees per site, two cores per tree). Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was used to distinguish regions with similar increment patterns. Climate-growth relationships were calculated by means of the PRECON program (Fritts 1996). We were able to recognize four main groups where linkage distance is higher than 2 (Figs. 14.1 and 14.2). Tree-ring-widths from three regions (1a, 1b, 2a) are mostly determined by precipitation during the vegetation period, especially from May to July (Tables 14.1, 14.2 and 14.3). Trees from the southern part of Poland (region 2b) are more sensitive to March temperature (Table 14.4).The decrease in dominance of the Atlantic climate from the south to the northeast is also responsible for distinguishing regions 2a and 2b. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2010.