Scaling flowering onset and duration responses among species predicts phenological community reassembly under warming

Abstract

Global warming has caused widespread shifts in plant phenology among species in the temperate zone, but it is unclear how population-level responses will scale to alter the structure of the flowering season at the community level. This knowledge gap exists largely because—while the climatic sensitivity of first flowering within populations has been studied extensively—little is known about the responsiveness of the duration of a population's flowering period. This limits our ability to anticipate how the entire flowering periods of co-occurring species may continue to change under warming. Nonetheless, flowering sensitivity to temperature often varies predictably among species between and within communities, which may help forecast temperature-related changes to a community's flowering season. However, no studies—empirical or theoretical—have assessed how patterns of variation in flowering sensitivity among species could scale to alter community-level flowering changes under warming. Here, we provide a conceptual overview of how variation in the sensitivity of flowering onset and duration among species can mediate changes to a community's flowering season due to warming trends. Specifically, we focus on the effects of differences in (1) the mean sensitivity of flowering onset and duration among communities and (2) the sensitivity of flowering onsets and durations among species flowering sequentially through the season within a community. We evaluated the manner and degree in which these forms of between-species variation in sensitivity might affect the structure of the flowering season—both independently and interactively—using simulations, which covered a wide but empirically informed range of parameter values and combinations representing distinct community-level patterns. Our findings predict that communities across the temperate zone will exhibit varied and often contrasting flowering responses to warming across biomes, underscoring that accounting for the temperature sensitivity of both phenological onset and duration among species is essential for understanding community-level flowering dynamics in a warming world.