Abstract
Climate change can impact forest ecosystem processes via individual tree and community responses. While the importance of land-use legacies in modulating these processes have been increasingly recognised, evidence of former land-use mediated climate-growth relationships remain rare. We analysed how differences in former land-use (i.e. forest continuity) affect the growth response of European beech to climate extremes. Here, using dendrochronological and fine root data, we show that ancient forests (forests with a long forest continuity) and recent forests (forests afforested on former farmland) clearly differ with regard to climate–growth relationships. We found that sensitivity to climatic extremes was lower for trees growing in ancient forests, as reflected by significantly lower growth reductions during adverse climatic conditions. Fine root morphology also differed significantly between the former land-use types: on average, trees with high specific root length (SRL) and specific root area (SRA) and low root tissue density (RTD) were associated with recent forests, whereas the opposite traits were characteristic of ancient forests. Moreover, we found that trees of ancient forests hold a larger fine root system than trees of recent forests. Our results demonstrate that land-use legacy-mediated modifications in the size and morphology of the fine root system act as a mechanism in regulating drought resistance of beech, emphasising the need to consider the ‘ecological memory’ of forests when assessing or predicting the sensitivity of forest ecosystems to global environmental change.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the local forest owners for allowing us to take increment cores and are grateful to Mechthild Stange, Thomas Niemeyer and Rafael Weidlich for assisting with fine root and soil analyses. KM was funded by a doctoral fellowship from the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU; AZ20013/279). We thank the reviewers and the editor for their constructive comments.
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AF, WH, GvO, CL and VMT designed the research; DH designed methodology for the root sampling and analysis; KM collected and compiled the data; KM and AF analysed the data; DH, BD and KJ assisted with the interpretation and discussion of root data; KM wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors substantially contributed to revisions and gave final approval for publication.
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Mausolf, K., Härdtle, W., Jansen, K. et al. Legacy effects of land-use modulate tree growth responses to climate extremes. Oecologia 187, 825–837 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-018-4156-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-018-4156-9