Herbarium specimens reveal substantial and unexpected variation in phenological sensitivity across the eastern United States. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 2018 Nov 19;374(1763)
Date
11/21/2018Pubmed ID
30455212Pubmed Central ID
PMC6282088DOI
10.1098/rstb.2017.0394Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85056713349 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 71 CitationsAbstract
Phenology is a key biological trait that can determine an organism's survival and provides one of the clearest indicators of the effects of recent climatic change. Long time-series observations of plant phenology collected at continental scales could clarify latitudinal and regional patterns of plant responses and illuminate drivers of that variation, but few such datasets exist. Here, we use the web tool CrowdCurio to crowdsource phenological data from over 7000 herbarium specimens representing 30 diverse flowering plant species distributed across the eastern United States. Our results, spanning 120 years and generated from over 2000 crowdsourcers, illustrate numerous aspects of continental-scale plant reproductive phenology. First, they support prior studies that found plant reproductive phenology significantly advances in response to warming, especially for early-flowering species. Second, they reveal that fruiting in populations from warmer, lower latitudes is significantly more phenologically sensitive to temperature than that for populations from colder, higher-latitude regions. Last, we found that variation in phenological sensitivities to climate within species between regions was of similar magnitude to variation between species. Overall, our results suggest that phenological responses to anthropogenic climate change will be heterogeneous within communities and across regions, with large amounts of regional variability driven by local adaptation, phenotypic plasticity and differences in species assemblages. As millions of imaged herbarium specimens become available online, they will play an increasingly critical role in revealing large-scale patterns within assemblages and across continents that ultimately can improve forecasts of the impacts of climatic change on the structure and function of ecosystems.This article is part of the theme issue 'Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene'.
Author List
Park DS, Breckheimer I, Williams AC, Law E, Ellison AM, Davis CCAuthor
Carley Davis MD Professor in the Urologic Surgery department at Medical College of WisconsinMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
Climate ChangeFruit
Life History Traits
Magnoliopsida
Museums
Reproduction
Specimen Handling
United States
