Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Phenology--the timing of biological events--is highly sensitive to climate change. However, our general understanding of how phenology responds to climate change is based almost solely on incomplete assessments of phenology (such as first date of flowering) rather than on entire phenological distributions. Using a uniquely comprehensive 39-y flowering phenology dataset from the Colorado Rocky Mountains that contains more than 2 million flower counts, we reveal a diversity of species-level phenological shifts that bring into question the accuracy of previous estimates of long-term phenological change. For 60 species, we show that first, peak, and last flowering rarely shift uniformly and instead usually shift independently of one another, resulting in a diversity of phenological changes through time. Shifts in the timing of first flowering on average overestimate the magnitude of shifts in the timing of peak flowering, fail to predict shifts in the timing of last flowering, and underrepresent the number of species changing phenology in this plant community. Ultimately, this diversity of species-level phenological shifts contributes to altered coflowering patterns within the community, a redistribution of floral abundance across the season, and an expansion of the flowering season by more than I mo during the course of our study period. These results demonstrate the substantial reshaping of ecological communities that can be attributed to shifts in phenology.
Language: English
Subfield: Nature and Landscape Conservation
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDGs: Life on land, Climate action
Open Access status: bronze
Awards: Population and Community-Level Consequences of Early-Summer Frosts, A Phenomenon That May Decrease as the Global ClimateChanges, Seventh Conference on Computer in the Undergraduate Curricula, Binghamton, New York, 06/14-16/75, LTREB: Abrupt Climate Change at High Altitudes and its Ecological Consequences, LTREB: Abundance and Phenology of Rocky Mountain Flowering Plants and Their Pollinators, The Role of Pollinator Effectiveness in Plant Population Dynamics, Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), LTREB: Drivers and consequences of phenological change at high altitudes, Plant Population Dynamics
OpenAlex ID: W2093568867