Fig. 1

Examples of a year’s growth for two trees to which Gompertz curves were fitted. A slower growing tree, in which a marked temporary growth slow-down occurred is shown in (a) while a faster growing tree which showed more constant growth is shown in (b). The open arrow shows where growth cessation may have been erroneously allocated if a smoothing function had not been used. The solid arrow shows where growth cessation was actually taken to have occurred after smoothing using the Gompertz function