TreeNet

New quickviews of current raw data available

TreeNet raw data of the past 7 days are now freely browsable. Try the following links to see the latest data of

• individual dendrometers of the entire network
• all available sensors of one site (Bachtel)
• air temperature (of TreeNet meteo-stations)
• relative humidity (of TreeNet meteo-stations)
• net radiation (of TreeNet meteo-stations)

The tool is made available by DecentLab and offers many options to find your own way to watch the latest data.

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Are there growth trends of the Swiss tree species over the past 5 years?

We are currently analyzing the drivers of wood growth of Swiss forest trees over the past five years (preliminary results).

Figure 1  Growth trends of the main tree species in Switzerland. Radial growth: radial increment per year; Cross section area growth: annual increment of the trees’ cross section area; Relative growth: Annual increment divided by the stem radius (preliminary results).

Wood growth is the result of determining factors at the time of growing but also a response to environmental conditions in the past (carry-over effects).  Carry-over effects include conditions of hours, days or even years ago. It includes e.g., the determination of buds in autumn of the past year but also the life-span of different organs of a tree like the sapwood, the leaves or the carbon storage pool.

No general growth trend was found (Fig. 1). However, there appear decreasing trends for some species over the past four years (2012-2015). Generally, the standard deviation from the respective means is large and there appear different patterns for different species.

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We are moving …

TreeNet.info is moving its data base and the related processing platform to a new server. Please apologize for inconvenience. All services including online data display and dendrometer processing tool will be back soon.

Stay tuned to www.treenet.info!

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Are trees able to grow in periods of stem shrinkage?

Publication in New Phytologist about separating stem radius measurements into growth and tree water deficit

Summary

• Separating continuously measured stem radius (SR) fluctuations into growth-induced irreversible stem expansion (GRO) and tree water deficit-induced reversible stem shrinkage (TWD) requires a conceptualization of potential growth processes that may occur during periods of shrinking and expanding SR below a precedent maximum. Here, we investigated two physiological concepts: the linear growth (LG) concept, assuming linear growth, versus the zero growth (ZG) concept, assuming no growth during periods of stem shrinkage.
• We evaluated the physiological mechanisms underlying these two concepts and assessed their respective plausibilities using SR data obtained from 15 deciduous and evergreen trees.
• The application of the LG concept produced steady growth rates, whereas growth rates varied strongly under the ZG concept, more in accordance with mechanistic expectations. Further, growth increased for a maximum of 120 min after periods of stem shrinkage, indicating limited growth activity during those periods. However, this extra growth was found to be a small fraction of total growth only. Furthermore, TWD under the ZG concept was better explained by a hydraulic plant model than TWD under the LG concept.
• We conclude that periods of stem shrinkage allow for very little growth in the four tree species investigated. However, further studies should focus on obtaining independent growth data to ultimately validate these findings.

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Dendrometer processing tool online now

TreeNet.info offers a public tool to process your own raw dendrometer data now. Your dendrometer data will be aligned, cleaned for jumps and outliers, gap-filled for short periods <3 hours, interpolated for a data resolution of your choice and downloaded as a final csv-file.

All you need to do is to upload your set of dendrometer data incl. air temperatures. With the help of a couple of processing parameters you can optimize the quality of the output. Note: always start with excluding periods of obviously not useful data and press ‘process’. Have a try!

Dendrometer Data Processing Tool

The underlying steps of the processing platform ‘TreeNet_Pro’ are currently in preparation to be published. The online tool is based on the same processing steps as for our TreeNet-realtime data.

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