Age-Dependent Climate Sensitivity of Korean Pine (Pinus koraiensis) in the Southern Sikhote-Alin Mountains

Global climate change is driving profound transformations in forest ecosystems, particularly in monsoon-influenced regions of the Pacific coast of Asia, such as the Sikhote-Alin Mountains. Long-lived conifer species, notably Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis Siebold (ii) an individual-tree analysis, applying correlation and regression directly to individual ring-width series. Climate–growth relationships were assessed using monthly temperature, precipitation, and drought indices (PDSI, SPEI). For the stage-based approach, radial growth was positively correlated with the mean August temperature of the previous year (up to r = 0.61), minimum November temperature (up to r = 0.50), and summer drought indices (up to r = 0.57). Age-related trends in climate sensitivity, assessed from regression models under both approaches, were significant for 9 of the 18 monthly climate variables examined. For stage-specific chronologies, simple regressions across six ontogenetic stages described up to 98% of the variance, whereas cambial-age-based relationships were much weaker (R2 = 0.03–0.14). These findings highlight the importance of accounting for ontogenetic structure in dendroclimatic analyses and climate reconstructions. Such insights are critical for understanding long-term forest dynamics and informing climate adaptation strategies in Korean pine-dominated ecosystems.