Miloš Rydval

• PhD
• Researcher at Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Nonclimatic disturbance events are an integral element in the history of forests. Although the identification of the occurrence and duration of such events may help to understand environmental history and landscape change, from a dendroclimatic perspective, disturbance can obscure the climate signal in tree rings. However, existing detrending metho...

Large-scale millennial length Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature reconstructions have been pro- gressively improved over the last 20 years as new datasets have been developed. This paper, and its companion (Part II, Anchukaitis et al. in prep), details the latest tree-ring (TR) based NH land air temperature reconstruction from a temporal and spat...

This study presents a summer temperature reconstruction using Scots pine tree-ring chronologies for Scotland allowing the placement of current regional temperature changes in a longer-term context. ‘Living-tree’ chronologies were extended using ‘subfossil’ samples extracted from nearshore lake sediments resulting in a composite chronology >800 year...

Dendroclimatic reconstructions play a key role in contextualizing recent climate change by improving our understanding of past climate variability. The Blue Intensity (BI) measurement technique is gaining prominence as a more accessible alternative to X-ray densitometry for producing climatically highly-sensitive tree-ring predictors. Nevertheless,...

Tree stems represent a long-lived biomass compartment for atmospheric carbon sequestration. While terrestrial biosphere models predict rising carbon sequestration in forests, direct observations of tree growth are inconclusive due to varying standardization procedures of tree-ring series and complex factors influencing stem growth such as moisture...

Dry and warm climate conditions in southern Europe represent clear limits for European beech (Fagus sylvatica) growth near the species southern distribution limit, but it is unclear how aridification and changes in seasonal precipitation regimes will affect these forests at the individual level. We explored climate-growth relationships and the seas...

The Carpathian Mountains span across Central and Eastern Europe and provide vital ecosystem functions and services. For this reason, the conservation status of the Carpathians is critical due to the rising environmental pressures from deforestation and climate change, which have significantly affected the region's ecosystem dynamics and communities...

Quantitative wood anatomy (QWA) has been widely recognized as a valuable tool for extracting a range of anatomical and environmental information from tree-rings. Despite the well-documented potential of QWA parameters for dendrochronological research, producing anatomical slides remains a time-consuming, costly, and technically challenging process....

Primary forests are spatially diverse terrestrial ecosystems with unique characteristics, being naturally regenerative and heterogeneous, which supports the stability of their carbon storage through the accumulation of live and dead biomass. Yet, little is known about the interactions between biomass stocks, tree genus diversity and structure acros...

Basic ecological theory suggests that a tradeoff between competitiveness and stress tolerance dictates species range limits at regional extents. However, empirical support for this key theory remains deficient because the necessary spatial and temporal coverage and scalability of field observations has rarely been achieved. We harnessed an extensiv...

The future performance of the widely abundant European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) across its ecological amplitude is uncertain. Although beech is considered drought-sensitive and thus negatively affected by drought events, scientific evidence indicating increasing drought vulnerability under climate change on a cross-regional scale remains elusive....

In recent decades, extreme droughts have affected Central Europe, altering forest structure and function with significant socioeconomic consequences. Most Central European forests are used for timber production and provide various ecosystem services and habitats for forest-dwelling species. The extent to which recent weather extremes have impacted...

Temperate forests are undergoing significant transformations due to the influence of climate change, including varying responses of different tree species to increasing temperature and drought severity. To comprehensively understand the full range of growth responses, representative datasets spanning extensive site and climatic gradients are essent...

The Carpathian Mountains span Central and Eastern Europe and provide vital ecosystem functions and services. For this reason, the conservation status of the Carpathians is critical due to environmental pressures such as deforestation and the impacts of climate change, which has significantly affected the region's ecosystem dynamics and communities...

Understanding temporal and spatial variations in historical disturbance regimes across intact, continuous, and altitudinally diverse primary forest landscapes is imperative to help forecast forest development and adapt forest management in an era of rapid environmental change. Because few complex primary forest landscapes remain in Europe, previous...

Assessing the impacts of natural disturbance on the functioning of complex forest systems are imperative in the context of global change. The unprecedented rate of contemporary species extirpations, coupled with widely held expectations that future disturbance intensity will increase with warming, highlights a need to better understand how natural...

Global change outcomes for forests will be strongly influenced by the demography of juvenile trees. We used data from an extensive network of forest inventory plots in Europe to quantify relationships between climate factors and growth rates in sapling trees for two ecologically dominant species, Norway spruce and European beech. We fitted nonlinea...

Tree radial growth is influenced by climatic and various non-climatic factors, which can complicate the extraction of climate signals from tree rings. We investigated the influence of disturbance on tree-ring width (RW) and latewood blue intensity (BI) chronologies of Norway spruce from the Carpathian Mountains to explore the extent to which distur...

Radial tree growth is sensitive to environmental conditions, making observed growth increments an important indicator of climate change effects on forest growth. However, unprecedented climate variability could lead to non‐stationarity, that is, a decoupling of tree growth responses from climate over time, potentially inducing biases in climate rec...

Climate controls forest biomass production through direct effects on cambial activity and indirectly through interactions with CO2, air pollution, and nutrient availability. The atmospheric concentration of CO2, sulfur and nitrogen deposition can also exert a significant indirect control on wood formation since these factors influence the stomatal...

The continuous development of new proxies as well as a refinement of existing tools are key to advances in paleoclimate research and improvements in the accuracy of existing climate reconstructions. Herein, we build on recent methodological progress in dendroanatomy, the analyses of wood anatomical parameters in dated tree rings, and introduce the...

Understanding the processes shaping the composition of assemblages at multiple spatial scales in response to disturbance events is crucial for preventing ongoing biodiversity loss and for improving current forest management policies aimed at mitigating climate change and enhancing forest resilience. Deadwood-inhabiting fungi represent an essential...

The mechanistic pathways connecting ocean-atmosphere variability and terrestrial productivity are well-established theoretically, but remain challenging to quantify empirically. Such quantification will greatly improve the assessment and prediction of changes in terrestrial carbon sequestration in response to dynamically induced climatic extremes....

The growth of past, present, and future forests was, is and will be affected by climate variability. This multifaceted relationship has been assessed in several regional studies, but spatially resolved, large-scale analyses are largely missing so far. Here we estimate recent changes in growth of 5800 beech trees ( Fagus sylvatica L.) from 324 sites...

The continuous development of new proxies as well as a refinement of existing tools are key to advances in paleoclimate research and improvements in the accuracy of existing climate reconstructions. Herein, we build on recent methodological progress in dendroanatomy – the analyses of wood anatomical parameters in dated tree rings – and introduce th...

With accelerating environmental change, understanding forest disturbance impacts on trade-offs between biodiversity and carbon dynamics is of high socioeconomic importance. Most studies, however, have assessed immediate or short-term effects of disturbance, while long-term impacts remain poorly understood. Using a tree-ring-based approach, we analy...

Extreme tree growth reductions represent events of abrupt forest productivity decline and carbon sequestration reduction. An increase in their magnitude can represent an early warning signal of impending tree mortality. Yet the long‐term trends in extreme growth reductions remain largely unknown. We analyzed the trends in the proportion of trees ex...

Trees do not respond to climatic conditions uniformly, but instead show individualistic growth responses. The extent of and causes behind this within-stand variability represents significant uncertainty in predictions of how forests will respond to future climate change. We analyzed patterns of individualistic tree growth within two types of conife...

Wind is the leading disturbance agent in European forests, and the magnitude of wind impacts on forest mortality has increased over recent decades. However, the atmospheric triggers behind severe winds in Western Europe (large‐scale cyclones) differ from those in Southeastern Europe (small‐scale convective instability). This geographic difference i...

Adapting for competitiveness versus climatic stress tolerance constitutes a primary trade-off differentiating tree life-history strategies. This tradeoff likely influences where species’ range-limits occur, but such links are data-demanding to study and key mechanisms lack empirical support. Using an exceptionally rich dendroecological network, we...

While shifting disturbance rates and climate change have major implications for the structure of contemporary forests through their effects on adult tree mortality, the responses of regenerating trees to disturbances and environmental variation will ultimately determine the structure and functioning of forests in the future. Assessing the resilienc...

X‐ray microdensitometry on annually resolved tree‐ring samples has gained an exceptional position in last‐millennium paleoclimatology through the maximum latewood density (MXD) parameter, but also increasingly through other density parameters. For 50 years, X‐ray based measurement techniques have been the de facto standard. However, studies report...

We test the application of parametric, non-parametric, and semi-parametric calibration models for reconstructing summer (June–August) temperature from a set of tree-ring width and density data on the same dendro samples from 40 sites across Europe. By comparing the performance of the three calibration models on pairs” of tree-ring width (TRW) and m...

Recent work has linked historical crises, both regional and local, with palaeoclimatic estimates of global and hemispheric climate change. Such studies tend to underemphasize the spatiotemporal and socioeconomical disparity of human suffering and adaptive capacity as well as the complexities of past climate change. We focus herein on the effects in...

Key message Winter drought becomes a limiting factor of forest stand growth by the end of the twentieth century. Abstract Disturbances strongly influence the structure of natural forests. The frequency and severity of natural disturbances, as well as drought events, are expected to increase with climate change. Our study investigated if forests wi...

A long-distance edge effect influences structure of species-rich plant communities in temperate forest fragments surrounded by an agricultural landscape in Central Europe. Though the edge effect may be an aggregate of many environmental conditions, the thermal gradient from the forest edge to the forest interior deserves particular attention due to...

Climatic constraints on tree growth mediate an important link between terrestrial and atmospheric carbon pools. Tree rings provide valuable information on climate‐driven growth patterns, but existing data tend to be biased toward older trees on climatically extreme sites. Understanding climate change responses of biogeographic regions requires data...

A tree's radial growth sequence can be thought of as an aggregate of different growth components such as age and size limitations, presence or absence of disturbance events, continuous impact of climate variability and variance induced by unknown origin. The potentially very complex growth patterns with prominent temporal and spatial variability im...

Accurately capturing medium- to low-frequency trends in tree-ring data is vital to assessing climatic response and developing robust reconstructions of past climate. Non-climatic disturbance can affect growth trends in tree-ring-width (RW) series and bias climate information obtained from such records. It is important to develop suitable strategies...

While some cold regions show evidence of recent decoupling of tree-ring growth from observed temperature rise, i.e. restricted growth increase, similar evidence from other regions is missing. Increasing or diminishing regional coherency in tree growth has also been observed over recent decades. The temporal and spatial extent of the abovementioned...

Climate field reconstructions from networks of tree-ring proxy data can be used to characterize regional-scale climate changes, reveal spatial anomaly patterns associated with atmospheric circulation changes, radiative forcing, and large-scale modes of ocean-atmosphere variability, and provide spatiotemporal targets for climate model comparison and...

Dendroarchaeology almost exclusively uses ring-width (RW) data for dating historical structures and artefacts. Such data can be used to date tree-ring sequences when regional climate dominates RW variability. However, the signal in RW data can be obscured due to site specific ecological influences (natural and anthropogenic) that impact crossdating...

In order to gauge ongoing and future changes to disturbance regimes, it is necessary to establish a solid baseline of historic disturbance patterns against which to evaluate these changes. Further, understanding how forest structure and composition respond to variation in past disturbances may provide insight into future resilience to climate-drive...

A detailed understanding of past temporal patterns and spatial expression of temperature variations is important to place recent anthropogenic climate change into a longer term context. In order to fill the current gap in our understanding of northwest European temperature variability, point-by-point principal component regression was used to recon...

Maximum latewood density (MXD) is a strong proxy of summer temperatures. Despite this, there is a paucity of long MXD chronologies in the Northern Hemisphere, which limits large-scale tree-ring-based reconstructions of past temperature which are dominated by ring-width (RW) data – a weaker temperature proxy at inter-annual time-scales. This paucity...

Conifer forests in the Jizerské Mountains, Czech Republic have experienced widespread and long-lasting effects related to industrial SO 2 pollution. To explore the spatial and temporal impact of this phenomenon on Norway spruce stands, a transect of sites was sampled to the southeast of the Polish coal-fired power station Turów. Tree growth at all...

Despite promising research in the 1980s showing the potential of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) for the reconstruction of past summer temperatures in the Scottish Highlands, little dendroclimatic work has been attempted in this region since. This reflects, in part, the limited number of sparsely distributed remnant natural/semi-natural pine woodl...

Despite promising dendrochronological work in the 1980s showing the potential of Scots pine for the reconstruction of past summer temperatures in the Scottish Highlands, little dendroclimatic work has been attempted since. This situation is partly a result of the sparse number of remaining patches of semi-natural pine woodland in the Scottish Highl...