Slow Growth Leads to Longevity in Temperate Hardwoods

Discovering, studying, and preserving old trees is a top priority for conservation biology. We used tree‐ring data from a high‐mountain old‐growth beech forest to reconstruct long‐term growth patterns in trees of maximum longevity for temperate hardwoods. In these stands, individual growth history is highly variable; one tree can take from one to seven centuries to reach a large size (>60 cm dbh). Slow but overall increasing long‐term growth was found to be a prerequisite for extreme tree longevity. Growth suppression in early stages of life, together with limiting climatic conditions, also contributed to reaching maximum stem ages in these Mediterranean mountain environments. Photo credit: Gianluca Piovesan. Photo credit: Gianluca Piovesan. Photo credit: Gianluca Piovesan. Photo credit: left and center photos, Gianluca Piovesan; right photo, Vittoria Marchianò. Photo credit: left and center photos, Vittoria Marchianò; right photo, Giuseppe De Vivo. These photographs illustrate the article: “Lessons from the wild: Slow but increasing long‐term growth allows for maximum longevity in European beech” by Gianluca Piovesan, Franco Biondi, Michele Baliva, Giuseppe De Vivo, Vittoria Marchianò, Aldo Schettino, and Alfredo Di Filippo published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.273