Preliminary Dendroclimatological Analysis of Sessile Oak ( Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl.) in "Fruska Gora" National Park, Serbia

Abstract

A dendroclimatological analysis of Sessile oak has been carried out for the first time in Serbia on the area of National park "Fruska gora" (the northern part of Serbia). Two versions of chronology (standard and residual) were first established according to conventional dendrochronological procedures. To eliminate the chance of biasing the chronology indices and to extract climatic signals, the most important well known techniques were applied. The resulted chronologies span a period of 92 years from 1919 to 2010 and, according to the values of obtained parameters (r(bar), EPS, SNR and PC1) for a common period (1938-2010), it was concluded that the established chronologies possess a satisfactory level of common signal, which represents the common variability present in all series of radial increment in a given site condition. To ascertain the relationships between oak radial increment and monthly and seasonal precipitation and temperature data (1) correlation functions, (2) response functions and (3) pointer year's analysis were applied. It was obvious that radial increment of oak for the studied site was influenced more by precipitation than temperature. The tendency towards positive response to previous year's precipitation (especially in the period September-October) and negative response to current summer temperature (particularly in August) were recorded. The largest number of identified positive pointer years corresponded to wet previous September and October precipitation. The results described here represented a preliminary stage of dendroclimatological study of sessile oak for this region and for this reason future studies should be undertaken in order to expand data base and knowledge of the climate influence on sessile oak growth in the studied region as well as in many other regions in Serbia.