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Forests on oceanic islands, such as the Azores archipelago, enable interesting dendroclimatic research, given their pronounced climatic gradients over short geographical distances, despite the less pronounced seasonality. The Lauraceae play an essential ecological role in Macaronesian natural forests. An example is Laurus azorica (Seub.) Franco, a relevant species given its high frequency and physiognomic dominance in Azorean laurel forests. This study aims to quantify climate–growth relationships in L. azorica using a dendroecological approach. We sampled four stands at São Miguel and two stands at Terceira islands, for a total of 206 trees. Following standard dendrochronological methods and rigorous sample selection procedures, we obtained relatively low rbar values and high temporal autocorrelation. Using a stepwise Random Forest analysis followed by Generalized Linear Models calculation, we found prominent effects of present and previous year temperature, but a low precipitation signal on growth rings, with some model variation between stands. Our results agreed with previous observations for broad-leaved species with diffuse porous wood, contributing to increase the baseline dendroecological knowledge about Azorean forests. Due to the high levels of within- and between-stand variation, and to refine the climatic signal analysis, complementary approaches should be explored in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laurus azorica is an endemic tree species from Azores archipelago. In this study, we generated the plastome sequence as a first step in a global assessment of island endemic Lauraceae. The total chloroplast genome was 153,061 bp in length, with a large single copy (LSC) region of 87,226 bp and a small single copy (SSC) region of 18,033 bp, separated by two inverted repeats (IRs) regions of 23,901 bp. The overall GC content was 37.3%, and 43.1%, 35.4%, and 31.1% in the IRs, LSC, and SSC regions, respectively. It contained 106 genes, including 79 coding genes, 24 tRNA genes, and four rRNA genes. A phylogenetic analysis confirmed that L. azorica was clustered with L. nobilis within the family Lauraceae. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]