National Forest Inventories (NFIs) perform systematic forest surveys across space and time. They are hence powerful tools to understand climate controls on forest growth at wide geographical scales and account for the effects of local abiotic and biotic interactions. To investigate the effects of climate change upon growth dynamics of four major European conifer species along elevation and continentality gradients, we herein provide an original harmonization of the French and Austrian NFI datasets. The growth of Norway spruce, Scots pine, silver fir and European larch over the 1996–2016 period was studied in pure and even-aged plots across different ecological regions. We derived climate-driven growth trends from > 65, 000 radial increment series filtered out from major biotic and abiotic influences using statistical modeling. We further identified primary environmental drivers of conifer growth by regressing growth trends against regionally aggregated biotic and abiotic forest attributes. Negative growth trends were observed in continental regions undergoing the most rapid warming and thermal amplitude contraction over the study period. Negative trends were also associated with lower forest structural heterogeneity and, surprisingly, with greater available water capacity. Remarkably, we observed these associations both at the inter- and intra-species levels, suggesting the universality of these primary growth determinants. Our study shows that harmonized NFI data at the transnational level provide reliable information on climate–growth interactions. Here, greater forest structural complexity and greater water resource limitation were highlighted as drivers of greater forest resilience to climate change at large-scale. This result forms crucial bases to implementing climate-smart forest management.

国家森林清单 (NFI) 执行跨空间和时间的系统森林调查。因此，它们是了解气候对广泛地理尺度森林生长的控制以及解释当地非生物和生物相互作用影响的有力工具。为了研究气候变化对四种主要欧洲针叶树物种沿海拔和大陆性梯度的生长动态的影响，我们在此提供了法国和奥地利 NFI 数据集的原始统一。对 1996 年至 2016 年期间挪威云杉、苏格兰松、银杉和欧洲落叶松的生长情况在不同生态区域的纯种和均龄地块中进行了研究。我们使用统计模型从主要生物和非生物影响中滤除的 > 65, 000 个径向增量系列得出气候驱动的增长趋势。我们通过对区域汇总的生物和非生物森林属性的增长趋势进行回归，进一步确定了针叶树生长的主要环境驱动因素。在研究期间，在经历最快速变暖和热幅度收缩的大陆地区观察到负增长趋势。负面趋势还与较低的森林结构异质性有关，而且令人惊讶的是，可用水容量较大。值得注意的是，我们在种间和种内水平上都观察到了这些关联，表明这些主要生长决定因素的普遍性。我们的研究表明，跨国层面的统一 NFI 数据提供了关于气候-增长相互作用的可靠信息。这里，更大的森林结构复杂性和更大的水资源限制被强调为提高森林对大规模气候变化的适应能力的驱动因素。这一结果构成了实施气候智能型森林管理的重要基础。