Our assessment will guide secondary users of tree-ring based hydroclimate reconstructions by providing information on the strength and limitations of the individual records beyond their simple correlation with instrumental data (Ljungqvist et al., 2020).

The rankings presented here can be used to select and exclude particular records for producing hemispheric scale reconstructions. The fact that some of the records appear more often towards the bottom of a ranking table does not mean they cannot be used for climate reconstruction purposes, but implies users of these data need to be aware of potential weaknesses that may inadvertently affect their experiment (Esper et al., 2016).