Our understanding of forest responses to the biotic and abiotic environment decreases rapidly from smaller to larger spatiotemporal scales. Refining this large-scale perspective is a key scientific challenge for climate impact research and forest management that I am determined to take up. I explore the considerable unrealized potential to upscale in-situ records of wood formation and provide quantitative insight in forest growth, carbon allocation and sequestration. By integrating tree-ring and wood anatomical data with eddy-covariance measurements, Earth observations, and vegetation models, I am working towards a multi-scale framework that helps us understand and forecast trajectories of forest growth and productivity.