Abstract
Changes to flowering phenology are a key response of plants to climate change. However, we know little about how these changes alter temporal patterns of reproductive overlap (i.e. phenological reassembly). We combined long-term field (1937–2012) and herbarium records (1850–2017) of 68 species in a flowering plant community in central North America and used a novel application of Bayesian quantile regression to estimate changes to flowering season length, altered richness and composition of co-flowering assemblages, and whether phenological shifts exhibit seasonal trends. Across the past century, phenological shifts increased species' flowering durations by 11.5 d on average, which resulted in 94% of species experiencing greater flowering overlap at the community level. Increases to co-flowering were particularly pronounced in autumn, driven by a greater tendency of late season species to shift the ending of flowering later and to increase flowering duration. Our results demonstrate that species-level phenological shifts can result in considerable phenological reassembly and highlight changes to flowering duration as a prominent, yet underappreciated, effect of climate change. The emergence of an autumn co-flowering mode emphasizes that these effects may be season-dependent.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 2486-2500 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | New Phytologist |
Volume | 243 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 2024 |
Keywords
- co-flowering
- flowering duration
- flowering synchrony
- global change
- growing season
- phenological shift
- species interactions
- temporal species assemblage