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Dynamics of moisture regime and its reconstruction from a tree-ring width chronology of Pinus sylvestris in the downstream basin of the Selenga River, Russia

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Abstract

Regional tree-ring width chronology of the Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) was constructed from 8 sites in the forest-steppe belt situated in the foothills of the Selenga River basin, Russia. Moisture information contained in tree-ring width chronology was obtained through linear regression reconstruction models of annual August–July precipitation and annual water discharge of the Selenga River during the period 1767–2015. Comparison of the smoothed series allowed estimating long-term variation component of these moisture regime parameters with a high precision. At the same time, regional drought indices are less correlated with pine radial growth, because they have contribution of the other environmental variables, which are much less reflected in the tree-ring of the investigated pine forest stands. Reconstructed dynamic of the moisture regime parameters is supported by documental evident of many socially significant events in the regional history, such as crop failures caused by both droughts and floods, and catastrophic fire in the Irkutsk City in 1879. Also, dependence of the amount of precipitation in the study area on the atmospheric circulation in Central Asia is revealed to have a similar pattern with other regions, i.e., a negative relationship of precipitation with the development of large high atmospheric pressure area within its center in the Altai and Tianshan mountains.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (17-04-00315), and the Russian Science Foundation (14-14-00219). The authors would like to thank Sergey Gennadievich ANDREEV for access to the tree-ring width data.

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  1. Khakass Technical Institute, Siberian Federal University, Abakan, 655017, Russia

    Liliana Belokopytova, Dina Zhirnova, Tatiana Kostyakova & Elena Babushkina

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  1. Liliana Belokopytova
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  2. Dina Zhirnova
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  3. Tatiana Kostyakova
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Correspondence to Liliana Belokopytova.

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Belokopytova, L., Zhirnova, D., Kostyakova, T. et al. Dynamics of moisture regime and its reconstruction from a tree-ring width chronology of Pinus sylvestris in the downstream basin of the Selenga River, Russia. J. Arid Land 10, 877–891 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40333-018-0025-y

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