Losses outlast gains in Northern Hemisphere tree growth under climate change
- 1Institute of Environmental Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel
Abstract
Under climate change, will forests grow more or less? The answer differs from place to place, obscuring the overall direction. Here we trace it by learning nonlinear climate--tree-growth relationships from 4110 Northern Hemisphere tree-ring chronologies recorded since 1902, spanning more than 12 million ring-width measurements, and projecting them through the twenty-first century under CMIP6 scenarios. Projected growth declines, and gains and losses are temporally asymmetric: once losses emerge, they are rarely reversed (90% retained), whereas gains fade (56% retained). This asymmetry holds in every well-sampled region and strengthens under higher forcing. The decline itself is driven by warming and rising atmospheric water demand, whose broadly negative contribution outweighs precipitation-driven gains. Across the Northern Hemisphere, growth does not just move between gains and losses; it is drawn steadily downward.
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BibTeX
@misc{feuer2026losses,
title = {{Losses outlast gains in Northern Hemisphere tree growth under climate change}},
author = {E. Feuer and S. Klesse and G. Amir and N. Peleg and Y. Mau},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.06.749676},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.06.749676v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Losses outlast gains in Northern Hemisphere tree growth under climate change
AU - E. Feuer
AU - S. Klesse
AU - G. Amir
AU - N. Peleg
AU - Y. Mau
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/06
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.06.749676
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.06.749676v1
AB - Under climate change, will forests grow more or less? The answer differs from place to place, obscuring the overall direction. Here we trace it by learning nonlinear climate--tree-growth relationships from 4110 Northern Hemisphere tree-ring chronologies recorded since 1902, spanning more than 12 million ring-width measurements, and projecting them through the twenty-first century under CMIP6 scenarios. Projected growth declines, and gains and losses are temporally asymmetric: once losses emerge, they are rarely reversed (90% retained), whereas gains fade (56% retained). This asymmetry holds in every well-sampled region and strengthens under higher forcing. The decline itself is driven by warming and rising atmospheric water demand, whose broadly negative contribution outweighs precipitation-driven gains. Across the Northern Hemisphere, growth does not just move between gains and losses; it is drawn steadily downward.
ER -