The early investigations on Scots pine in Lithuania were carried out in the 1970s and constructed local chronologies by J. Kairaitis, V. Stravinskienė and T. Bitvinskas were published in the first volume of chronologies. However, dendroclimatological investigations on Scots pine started much later. In 1984, T. Bitvinskas, based on eight experimental plots, revealed weak relationships with climatic factors. The coefficients of correlation did not exceed 0.44. A positive link was observed between the radial growth of pine and air temperature in April and an inverse link with precipitation in February.

Investigation in two experimental plots of pine near Kaunas was carried out in 1996 (Karpavičius et al. 1996). Based on response function analysis, positive relationships were found between the temperature in February and March and precipitation in June.

The findings were partly confirmed during investigations carried out throughout Lithuania (Vitas, 2004; Vitas, 2022). Pines were found to be sensitive to temperature in February, March and September (Baltic coastal zone). On the other hand. The influence of precipitation is much lower, and significant links in June and July were observed in western Lithuania. Pointer year analysis confirms the results of the response function. It demonstrates that lower than average temperatures in late winter to early spring triggered the formation of narrow tree rings, while warmer than usual conditions were related to a sharp growth increase. In western regions, tree-ring widths of pine were affected by rainfall in July (p = 0.02). In summary, Scots pine in Lithuania is a temperature-sensitive species considerably resistant to summer droughts.

The relationships calculated between local chronologies of living Scots pines used to construct regional chronologies demonstrate decreasing similarity with the distance between sites. That said, correlations higher than 0.40 are obtained only for sites located less than 50km apart. The relationships decrease to 0.35 when the distance increases to 100 km and drop to 0.20 at 250 km.

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