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Disentangling biology from mathematical necessity in twentieth-century gymnosperm resilience trends

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 5, pages 733–735 (2021)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 05 April 2021

The Original Article was published on 15 June 2020

arising from X. Li et al. Nature Ecology & Evolution https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1217-3 (2020).

We re-examine recent claims1 that tree growth resilience to drought has increased in gymnosperms during the second half of the twentieth century. Using more sensitive statistical techniques coupled with a different definition, we show that gymnosperm resilience, defined as the ratio of post- to pre-drought growth, decreased during the final part of the twentieth century. Multiple resilience indices should be employed when assessing trends of tree responses to drought.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of resilience and resistance measures using the indices employed by Li versus Lloret.

Data availability

Raw tree ring width data were obtained from the ITRDB (version 7.15) at https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/. Gridded standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index data (SPEIbase version 2.5) with a spatial resolution of 0.5° were obtained from http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/153475.

Code avilability

All statistical analyses were conducted in R (version 3.5.1) using the following libraries: lme4, lmerTest, MuMIn, performance, bestNormalize, emmeans, dplR, SPEI, ncdf4, effects, Taxonstand and taxonlookup. Additional R code is available at https://github.com/mmencuccini/ITRDB-data-analyses.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, China

    Tong Zheng

  2. CREAF, Barcelona, Spain

    Tong Zheng, Jordi Martínez-Vilalta, Raúl García-Valdés & Maurizio Mencuccini

  3. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Jordi Martínez-Vilalta & Raúl García-Valdés

  4. Joint Research Unit CTFC ‐ AGROTECNIO, Solsona, Spain

    Raúl García-Valdés

  5. Instituto Pirenaico de Ecologia (IPE-CSIC), Zaragoza, Spain

    Antonio Gazol & J. Julio Camarero

  6. ICREA, Barcelona, Spain

    Maurizio Mencuccini

Authors
  1. Tong Zheng
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  2. Jordi Martínez-Vilalta
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  3. Raúl García-Valdés
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  4. Antonio Gazol
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  5. J. Julio Camarero
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  6. Maurizio Mencuccini
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Contributions

T.Z., M.M., R.G.-V., J.J.C. and J.M.-V. designed the study. A.G. provided the ITRDB database. T.Z. and M.M. analysed the data with input from J.M.-V. and R.G.-V. T.Z. and M.M. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed substantially to revisions.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maurizio Mencuccini.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Nate Mcdowell and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Discussion, Figs. 1 and 2 and Tables 1 and 2.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data

Supplementary Data 1 and 2: resilience datasets.

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Zheng, T., Martínez-Vilalta, J., García-Valdés, R. et al. Disentangling biology from mathematical necessity in twentieth-century gymnosperm resilience trends. Nat Ecol Evol 5, 733–735 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01436-w

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