Growth–survival trade‐off in temperate trees is weak and restricted to late‐successional stages

2. Here, we investigate how disturbances shape the growth-survival trade-off by comparing early and late-successional forest stands across the eastern United States. Using large-scale sampling to capture the realised niche of 68 temperate species, we estimated species-specific mortality probabilities under zero growth (a proxy for resource-poor environments) applying a Bayesian multilevel modelling framework. We tested trade-offs between these estimates and species' maximum growth capacity (a proxy for resource-rich environments), within and across early and late-successional stands.

3. Overall, we found a weak growth-survival trade-off among temperate tree species (R 2 = 0.07). No clear evidence of this trade-off was found in early successional stands (R 2 = 0.02), while late-successional stands showed a relatively strongerthough still weak-positive association between species' maximum growth and mortality under zero growth conditions (R 2 = 0.17). Disturbances therefore seem to conduct data analyses are publicly available at