Tree rings provide a detailed archive of individual life histories, capturing the imprints of major climatic, ecological, and anthropogenic events over time. Beyond traditional measurements of ring width, recent methodological advances now encompass stable isotopes, wood anatomical traits, and intra-annual wood formation dynamics, enabling increasingly fine-scale reconstructions of tree growth and environmental variability. In this talk, I will illustrate, with results from ongoing projects, how diverse tree-ring proxies can be integrated to address fundamental and applied questions in forest ecology, ecophysiology, and evolutionary biology: i) providing early-warning signals for drought-induced tree mortality, ii) unraveling the climatic drivers determining tree water sources to refine tree-ring-derived climate reconstructions, and iii) investigating patterns of natural selection and adaptive potential in forest tree species for future climatic scenarios.