Speaker
Description
Knowing and understanding plant phenology patterns is important for three main reasons. 1. Plant phenology is sensitive to climate change, 2. It influences the dynamics and interaction between species, and 3. It drives essential ecosystem functions. To unravel spatio-temporal patterns in phenology, long-term data covering the spatial distribution of species is necessary. However, typically, data is locally limited and contains restricted phenological records (e.g., flowering only). An alternative to overcome this disadvantage is the space-for-time substitution method (SFTS), where the relationship between climate and phenological variables is used to predict phenological responses to climate changes over time.
We evaluate the SFTS approach on 42 herbaceous species, by comparing the spatial and temporal variation in flowering phenology in response to temperature and precipitation. For this, we use phenology data of 24 species from the European PEP725 database, and 20 species from the US NPN database, as well as temperature and precipitation data from the Era5-Land product. We evaluate linear models of the spatial-temporal relationship of the day of the year of flowering (DOYFlowering) with three timescales of temperature and precipitation data: annually, January to DOYFlowering, and month of DOYFlowering. We extracted the slopes as an indicator of flowering phenology response to climatic variables, and compared the spatial and temporal variation of slopes using a t-test.
Results indicate that phenological responses to changes in temperature and precipitation are significantly different between spatial and temporal scales. This means that there is no spatio-temporal equivalence in flowering phenology, suggesting that SFTS cannot easily be applied to predict phenological responses to changes in temperature and precipitation. In addition, it is shown that the phenological response to temperature and precipitation presents greater variation over time compared to space. Finally, the results highlight that the timescale of temperature and precipitation influences the direction of the phenological response.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
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