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Robust reconstruction of past climate and environmental change based on proxy data obtained from natural archives requires an in-depth understanding of the processes and mechanisms that form and determine these proxies. Here we present comprehensive long-term monitoring projects for seasonally laminated (varved) lake sediments and tree rings in the northern German lowlands. The two monitoring sites are located in the nature park Nossentiner/Schwinzer Heide (Tiefer See) and in the Müritz National Park (tree rings) and are an integral part of the Helmholtz TERrestrial ENvironmental Observatories (TERENO) infrastructure initiative. Both sites are located in the close vicinity of moraine deposits of the main ice advance of the Pomeranian phase of the Weichselian glaciation. This field guide provides an introduction to the local morphologies and landscapes as well as details of the monitoring concepts and some selected results.

Large earthquakes can increase the amount of water feeding stream flows, raise groundwater levels, and thus grant plant roots more access to water in water-limited environments. Here, we quantify growth and photosynthetic responses of Pinus radiata plantations to the Maule Mw 8.8 earthquake in geometrically simple headwater catchments of Chile's Coastal Range. To this end, we combine high-resolution wood anatomic (lumen area) and biogeochemical (δ13C of wood cellulose) proxies of daily to weekly tree growth sampled from trees on valley bottoms and close to ridge lines. We find that, immediately after the earthquake, at least two out of six tree trees on the valley floor had enlarged lumen area and lowered δ13C, while trees along the hillslope ridge had a reverse trend. Our findings favor a control of soil water on this response, largely consistent with models that predict how enhanced postseismic vertical soil permeability causes groundwater levels to rise on valley floors, but fall along the ridges. Statistical analysis with non-parametric boosted regression trees reveals that streamflow discharge gained importance for photosynthetic activity on the ridges, but lost importance on the valley floor after the earthquake. We conclude that earthquakes may stimulate ecohydrological conditions favoring tree growth over days to weeks by triggering stomatal opening. The weak and short-lived signals that we identified, however, imply that such responses are only valid under water-limited, rather than energy-limited tree, growth. Hence, dendrochronological studies targeted at annual resolution may overlook some earthquake effects on tree vitality.

We investigate the annual variability of δ18O tree ring records from sites distributed all over Europe covering the last 400 years. An Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis reveals two distinct modes of variability on the basis of the existing δ18O tree ring records. The first mode of δ18O variability is associated with anomaly patterns of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and reflects a multi-seasonal climatic signal. The ENSO signal is visible for the last 130 years, but is found weak during the period 1600 to 1850 suggesting that the relationship between ENSO and the European climate may not stable over time. The second mode of δ18O variability, which captures an out-of-phase variability between northwestern and southeastern European δ18O tree ring records, is related to a regional summer atmospheric circulation pattern revealing a pronounced centre over the North Sea. Locally, the δ18O anomalies associated with this mode show the same (opposite) sign with temperature (precipitation). We infer that the investigation of large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns and related teleconnections far beyond instrumental records can be done with oxygen isotopic signature derived from tree rings. However, the European δ18Ocel tree network needs to be consolidated and updated, as well as additional research on the stationarity of reconstructed climate signals and the stationarity of teleconnections is advisable.

Many forests in Central Europe experienced unprecedented drought conditions in 2018. The exceptionally long dry period, lasting from early-summer 2018 and into the winter, was followed by another dry summer with record-breaking temperatures. Ecohydrological consequences of extended droughts for these temperate forest systems are difficult to anticipate, and investigating the resilience of forest hydrological systems requires comprehensive and systematic long-term observations.Monitoring at the TERENO-NE temperate forest observatory in northeastern Germany includes input characterization (throughfall and stemflow), high-resolution soil moisture observations in 14 different forest stands down to a depth of 2 m below the soil surface, shallow and deep groundwater observations, sap flow, tree water deficit and high-resolution tree growth measurements since 2012. The investigated forest stands cover the three tree species pine, oak and beech in both pure and mixed stands. This is complemented by terrestrial gravimetric measurements of total water storage changes. Steep hillslope transects allow us to investigate the impact of presence or absence of groundwater availability on tree water uptake and growth.We find that after the unprecedented drought in 2018, which already had pronounced ecohydrological effects, the rainfall amounts over the winter 2018/19 were insufficient to refill the subsurface water storages. Dry conditions altered the growth phenology of each monitored tree species, while tree-water deficit and tree growth were negatively impacted in both years, but to varying extent. Soil moisture storage and dynamics are strongly affected and the drought caused a long-term memory effect.

May-to-September mean temperatures over the larger Pyrenees area (Northern Spain and Southern France) are reconstructed for the last Millennium from 22 maximum density (MXD) tree-ring chronologies. For the standardization of the tree-ring series, two detrending methods (Regional Curve Standardization (RCS) and 300-yr spline) were combined with and without an adaptive power transform (PT) for variance stabilization in the individual series. Thus, four different standardization procedures were applied to the data. Additionally, different regional chronologies were generated by computing a mean composite, averaging the local chronologies, or by applying Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to extract common variance from the subsets of individual MXD chronologies. Calibration-verification trials were performed using the product of the three regional aggregation methods in split periods: 1900–1952 and 1953–2006. Two methods were used to calibrate the regional chronology: regression and a simple variance-matching, sometimes also known as composite-plus-scaling. The resulting set of temperature reconstructions was compared with climate simulations performed with global (ECHO-G over the last Millennium for the target region) and regional (MM5) climate models. The reconstructions reveal inter-annual to multi-centennial temperature variations at the Pyrenees region for the last 750 yr. Generally, variations at inter-decadal timescales, including the cold periods associated with the solar minima, are common to all reconstruction variants although some discrepancies are found at longer timescales. The simulations of the global circulation model ECHO-G and the regional model MM5 agree with the tree-ring based reconstructions at decadal to multi-decadal time-scales. However, the comparison also highlights differences that need to be understood, such as the amplitude of the temperature variations and the discrepancies regarding the 20th century trends.