Hotter drought and trade-off between fast and slow growth strategies as major drivers of tree-ring growth variability of global conifers

We found: a) growth variability was mainly affected by warm-induced drought and increased at lower latitudes. Climate warming in winter could decrease growth variability, but this effect is by far not enough to offset the threat of hotter drought; b) there existed a trade-off between fast- and slow-growing (drought tolerance) strategies for global conifer species, and abiotic and stand factors affected growth variability via functional traits. Contrary to common conjecture, species with higher drought tolerance revealed higher growth variability due to their occupation of more xeric sites, and may also because higher investment in drought tolerance leads to less investment remaining for growth; c) older trees revealed higher growth variability due to their more conservative growth strategy, while at large scales taller trees showed lower growth variability due to occupying more productive sites; and d) moderate N deposition could reduce growth variability by leading conifers to adopt a ..., Raw tree-ring widths data were extracted from the International Tree-Ring Data Bank (ITRDB) V.7.23 (https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/) in October 2021. 
The monthly temperature, precipitation, and potential evapotranspiration during 1970-2010 were extracted for each tree-ring site based on its latitude and longitude, from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) database (https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/).
N deposition data were obtained from the N Deposition Database (Ackerman et al. 2019; https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018GB005990), which used the GEOS-Chem Chemical Transport Model to estimate total (wet and dry) inorganic N deposition globally at a spatial resolution of 2°×2.5°.
For stand factors, the stand age of each chronology was calculated as the mean age for all tree rings used to build the chronology.
This global canopy height map was estimated with new satellite LiDAR (light detecting and ranging) data, with a high accuracy and a ver..., , ## GENERAL INFORMATION

**1. Title of Dataset:**

Hotter drought and trade-off between fast and slow growth strategies as major drivers of tree-ring growth variability of global conifers

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.31zcrjdt](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.31zcrjdt)

**2. Author information:**

First author: Xuemei Wang, Beijing Forestry University, China; [[e-mail];](mailto:wxmbju@163.c)

Corresponding author: Xiangping Wang, Beijing Forestry University, China; [[e-mail];](mailto:wangxiangpingbjfu@edu.c)

**3. Summary of the dataset:**

We used global conifer (mainly from North America, Asia, and Europe) tree-ring records (123 species from 1,780 sites) from 1970–2010 to calculate growth variability and assess how climate factors and stand factors affect growth variability (coefficient of variation)

## Description of the data and file structure

DATA-SPECIFIC INFORMATION FOR: database.xls

1\. Number of variables: 25

2\. Number of cases/rows: 2023

3\. Variable...