Evidence of unprecedented rise in growth synchrony from global tree ring records

Changes in the temporal coherence between populations, which can influence their stability, resilience and persistence, remain a critical uncertainty of climate change. Recent studies have documented increasing spatial synchrony between populations at continental scales and linked it to anthropogenic climate change. However, the lack of long-term and global baseline perspectives on spatial synchrony presents a challenge to understanding the importance of these trends. Here, we show a steady rise in the spatial synchrony of annual tree growth from a global tree ring database over the past 50 years that is consistent across continents, species and environmental conditions and is unprecedented for the past millennium. Increasing growth synchrony coincided with warming trends and potentially rising synchrony in the temperature records. We discuss the potential driving mechanisms and the limitations in the interpretation of this trend, and we propose that increasing mutual dependency on external factors (also known as Moran's effect) linked to rising global temperatures is the most likely driver of more homogeneous global growth dynamics.