Published October 17, 2019 | Version v1
Journal article Open

Divergent Responses of Community Reproductive and Vegetative Phenology to Warming and Cooling: Asymmetry Versus Symmetry

  • 1. Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • 2. Binhai Research Institute in Tianjin
  • 3. University of Chicago
  • 4. National Agriculture and Food Research Organization

Description

Few studies have focused on the response of plant community phenology to temperature change using manipulative experiments. A lack of understanding of whether responses of community reproductive and vegetative phenological sequences to warming and cooling are asymmetrical or symmetrical limits our capacity to predict responses under warming and cooling. A reciprocal transplant experiment was conducted for 3 years to evaluate response patterns of the temperature sensitivities of community phenological sequences to warming (transferred downward) and cooling (transferred upward) along four elevations on the Tibetan Plateau. We found that the temperature sensitivities of flowering stages had asymmetric responses to warming and cooling, whereas symmetric responses to warming and cooling were observed for the vegetative phenological sequences. Our findings showed that coverage changes of flowering functional groups (FFGs; i.e., early-spring FFG, mid-summer FFG, and late-autumn FFG) and their compensation effects combined with required accumulated soil temperatureto codetermined the asymmetric and symmetric responses of community phenological sequences to warming and cooling. These results suggest that coverage change in FFGs on warming and cooling processes can be a primary driver of community phenological variation and may lead to inaccurate phenlogical estimation at large scale, such as based on remote sensing.

Data availability

All datasets generated for this study are included in the manuscript/Supplementary Files.

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fpls-10-01310.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

DOI
10.3389/fpls.2019.01310
Other
oai:uchicago.tind.io:14698

Funding

National Science Foundation of China
41230750
National Science Foundation of China
31672470
National Science Foundation of China
31470524
National Key Research and Development Program of China
2016YFC0501802
China Postdoctoral Science Foundation
2017LH033
China Postdoctoral Science Foundation
2018M640187
National Natural Science Foundation for the Youth of China
31702162

UChicago Information

Division(s)
Biological Sciences Division
Department(s)
Medicine