Landscapes heavily impacted by human activities amplify climate sensitivity of Aleppo pine growth

Increasing air temperatures and summer drought increasingly constrain tree growth across the Mediterranean region, but these responses occur within landscapes modified by urbanization, industrial infrastructure, and artificial land cover. How anthropogenic landscape context alters climate-growth relationships remains poorly understood, especially in planted stands and across spatial scales. Here, we investigated tree-ring growth of planted Pinus halepensis Mill. stands across 41 sites spanning contrasting levels of anthropogenic pressure in southern Italy. Using hierarchical mixed-effects models, we tested whether anthropogenic proxies act as additive drivers of radial growth or instead modify sensitivity to summer temperature and hydroclimatic variability. Summer mean temperature was the dominant climatic constraint on growth, whereas SPEI-12 showed a weaker but consistent additional effect. Anthropogenic variables had limited and inconsistent additive effects on ring width, but strongly modified climate sensitivity through interaction effects. Local artificial land cover, especially within 1 km, consistently amplified sensitivity to summer heat and was the strongest anthropogenic moderator of growth responses. By contrast, hydroclimatic sensitivity was spatially heterogeneous, with attenuated SPEI responses near the industrial core and stronger responses farther away. A final random-slope model confirmed that this amplification persisted after accounting for heterogeneity among sites and individual trees. Our results show that landscapes heavily impacted by human activities do not simply shift growth levels, but reshape climate-growth relationships in planted Mediterranean pine stands. Fine-scale human modification should therefore be considered when assessing planted-stand vulnerability to future warming.