TY - JOUR T1 - Twentieth century redistribution in climatic drivers of global tree growth JF - Science Advances JO - Sci Adv DO - 10.1126/sciadv.aat4313 VL - 5 IS - 1 SP - eaat4313 AU - Babst, Flurin AU - Bouriaud, Olivier AU - Poulter, Benjamin AU - Trouet, Valerie AU - Girardin, Martin P. AU - Frank, David C. Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaat4313.abstract N2 - Energy and water limitations of tree growth remain insufficiently understood at large spatiotemporal scales, hindering model representation of interannual or longer-term ecosystem processes. By assessing and statistically scaling the climatic drivers from 2710 tree-ring sites, we identified the boreal and temperate land areas where tree growth during 1930–1960 CE responded positively to temperature (20.8 ± 3.7 Mio km2; 25.9 ± 4.6%), precipitation (77.5 ± 3.3 Mio km2; 96.4 ± 4.1%), and other parameters. The spatial manifestation of this climate response is determined by latitudinal and altitudinal temperature gradients, indicating that warming leads to geographic shifts in growth limitations. We observed a significant (P &lt; 0.001) decrease in temperature response at cold-dry sites between 1930–1960 and 1960–1990 CE, and the total temperature-limited area shrunk by −8.7 ± 0.6 Mio km2. Simultaneously, trees became more limited by atmospheric water demand almost worldwide. These changes occurred under mild warming, and we expect that continued climate change will trigger a major redistribution in growth responses to climate. ER -