Figure 3

Lifetime mean annual radial growth of individual black spruce trees (n = 85,982) aligned by year of recruitment (pith year). The upper blue line corresponds to the maximum radial growth rates as a function of recruitment years, G_max (t_recr) = D_max/(2012 − t_recr); the lower red line corresponds to the minimum growth rate at which a tree can reach the minimum diameter threshold, G_min (t_recr) = D_thresh/(2012 − t_recr). Trees growing faster than G_max (t_recr) (blue line) would have reached diameters larger than the 99 percentile size (D_max), and are unlikely to be still alive in 2012. The absence of fast growers from the distant past (blue shaded area) has been previously described as the “slow grower survivorship bias”²³. The red shaded area corresponds to missing slow-growing trees that grew at rates slower than G_min (t_recr) and did not reach the minimum size threshold (D_thresh) (i.e., “big-tree selection bias”)²³.