Citation
David, A. A., Boura, A., Lata, J. C., Rankovic, A., Kraepiel, Y., Charlot, C., ... & Ngao, J. (2018). Street trees in Paris are sensitive to spring and autumn precipitation and recent climate changes. Urban ecosystems, 21(1), 133-145.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-017-0704-z
Abstract
Determining the main factors causing urban treedecline is becoming essential for sustaining their healthand survival. Understanding responses of tree growth tourban environments and climate change throughout treelife span is thus necessary. To explore these questions, adendrochronological study exploring past climate-treegrowth relationships was conducted on street and park sil-ver lindens in Paris, according to different DBH classesused as a proxy of tree age, and using climatic data forthe 1970–2013 period. Younger urban silver lindens pre-sented high sensitivity to climate with highest growth rate.In comparison with park trees, street trees had higher sen-sitivity to climate and lower growth rates. Climatic andpointer years analysis pointed out the importance ofdrought characterization in order to understand its potentialimpact on tree annual growth and functioning. Urban silverlindens growth is mainly and strongly correlated with pre-cipitations and especially in autumn and spring. Finally,our study on temporal evolution between climatic factorsand growth through 1970–2013 periods showed a strongerstability between growth and precipitation only in Octoberand revealed quick climatic changes since 40 yearsimpacting the relation between tree growth and climate.Our study highlights that an optimized irrigation manage-ment, specifically in respect of tree phenology, could con-tribute to maximizing silver linden functioning and surviv-al in Paris under climate change.
