Pre- and post-drought conditions drive resilience of Pinus halepensis across its distribution range

Abstract

[EN] Severe droughts limit tree growth and forest productivity worldwide, a phenomenon which is expected to aggravate over the next decades. However, how drought intensity and climatic conditions before and after countries across the Mediterranean basin, representing the entire geographic and bioclimatic range of the species. For each site and year of the period 1950-2020, we quantified tree-growth resilience and its two components, resistance and recovery, to account for the impact of drought and the capacity to recover from it. Relative climatic water deficit index. Generalized additive mixed models were used to explore the non-linear relationships post-drought conditions. In contrast to our expectations, drought intensity only slightly affected resilience, which Resilience and its components are highly dependent on preceding and following years climatic conditions, which should always be taken into account when studying growth response to drought. With the observed and may become rare, thus threatening the future acclimation capacity of P. halepensis in its current distribution.