Similar to international trends, late winter-early spring climatic conditions have changed significantly in the last 100 years in Hungary. Thermal circumstances have a remarkable role on the onset of spring and hereby on the dynamics of tree-ring growth at the beginning of the vegetation period. Since investigations about the effect of increasing temperature in February and March on annual increment have never been done in Hungary we set as our aim the study how and how much the changing conditions affect the climate-growth relationship on long-term timescale. During our work, we analysed earlywood, latewood and total tree-ring separately and determined their correspondence with climate data using bootstrapped correlation. To evaluate the changes in climate-growth connection we calculated 25-year moving window correlation values between the residual indices and temperature data. According to our results, thermal conditions of February and March have significant positive effects on tree-ring growth but this effect has changed a lot during the past 100 years. In parallel with the intensive warming, which has started in the middle of 1960’s, the role of temperature in formation of different tree-ring parameters has decreased dramatically. As it was reported in Poland as well, the stable and strong correlation, which typified the connection of early spring temperature and tree-ring growth, has totally ceased at the beginning of the century.

Keywords: Scots pine, dendroclimatology, earlywood, latewood, moving window correlation, increasing temperature