Phenology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Comment
    | Open Access

    The response of aquatic and terrestrial organisms to climate change can depend on biological sex. A key challenge is to unravel the interactive effects of sex and climate change at the individual and population levels and the cascading effects on communities. This new understanding is essential to improve climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.

    • Elena Gissi
    • , Londa Schiebinger
    •  & Fiorenza Micheli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phenological shifts driven by climate change are well-studied in plants and aboveground animals, but scarcely in belowground biota. Here, the authors show that soil warming causes phenological mismatches between plants, soil microbes and soil microarthropods in an alpine meadow.

    • Rui Yin
    • , Wenkuan Qin
    •  & Biao Zhu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change and earlier snowmelt could potentially extend the growing season for alpine grassland plants. Here, the authors combine field and chamber controlled experiments to show that extending the summer period did not result in prolonged root and leaf growth.

    • Patrick Möhl
    • , Raphael S. von Büren
    •  & Erika Hiltbrunner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change may be inducing phenological mismatches between trees and understory plants. Here, phenological models based on long-term data from herbarium specimens indicate that spring ephemeral wildflowers are more vulnerable to such mismatches in North America than in Eurasia.

    • Benjamin R. Lee
    • , Tara K. Miller
    •  & Richard B. Primack

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The mechanisms underlying plant phenological shifts are debated. Here, based on phenological observations and ecosystem flux and climate data, Gu and colleagues provide evidence that warming-enhanced photosynthesis in a growing season contributes to earlier spring phenology in the following year in temperate and boreal forests.

    • Hongshuang Gu
    • , Yuxin Qiao
    •  & Lei Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Intra-specific variations may contribute to heterogeneous responses to climate change across a species’ range. Here, the authors investigate the phenology of two bird species across their breeding ranges, and find that their sensitivity to temperature is uncoupled from exposure to climate change.

    • Liam D. Bailey
    • , Martijn van de Pol
    •  & Marcel E. Visser

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Even evergreen tropical forests can have seasonal dynamics, which may be sensitive to disturbance. Here, the authors combine high-resolution remote sensing observations and microclimate data to show that forest fragmentation impacts canopy phenology dynamics in the Amazon forest.

    • Matheus Henrique Nunes
    • , José Luís Campana Camargo
    •  & Eduardo Eiji Maeda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ongoing disproportionate increases in temperature and precipitation in the Alaska may alter the latitudinal gradients in greenup and snowmelt timings as well as carbon dynamics. With a broad range of datasets and model results, the authors show that the carbon response to early greenup or delayed snowmelt varies greatly depending upon local climatic limits.

    • JiHyun Kim
    • , Yeonjoo Kim
    •  & Crystal L. Schaaf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Long-distance bird migration timing is thought to be relatively inflexible despite climate change. Here, based on 13 years of mark-resight and geolocator-tracking data on bar-tailed godwits, the authors report a 6-day advance of departure time which is explained by an unexpected degree of individual plasticity.

    • Jesse R. Conklin
    • , Simeon Lisovski
    •  & Phil F. Battley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear whether climate driven phenological shifts of tundra plants are consistent across the plant growing season. Here the authors analyse data from a network of field warming experiments in Arctic and alpine tundra, finding that warming differentially affects the timing and duration of reproductive and vegetative phenology.

    • Courtney G. Collins
    • , Sarah C. Elmendorf
    •  & Katharine N. Suding

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Most mammals are nocturnal, but a new analysis suggests that although most groups of species active at a particular time of day or night occupy different ecological niches, a surprisingly large proportion of species are more flexible in the timing of their activity than previously thought.

    • D. T. C. Cox
    • , A. S. Gardner
    •  & K. J. Gaston

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate warming is advancing spring leaf unfolding, but it is also reducing the cold periods that many trees require to break winter dormancy. Here, the authors show that 7 of 12 current chilling models fail to account for the correct relationship between chilling accumulation and heat requirement, leading to substantial overestimates of the advance of spring phenology under climate change.

    • Huanjiong Wang
    • , Chaoyang Wu
    •  & Quansheng Ge

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding how life cycles of vectors respond to climatic factors is important to predict potential shifts in vector-borne disease risk in the coming decades. Here the authors develop a mechanistic phenological model for the invasive mosquito Aedes aegypti and apply it to project shifts under climate change scenarios.

    • Takuya Iwamura
    • , Adriana Guzman-Holst
    •  & Kris A. Murray

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many species’ life cycles have moved earlier in the year because of climate change, but we do not know the consequences for range expansions. The authors show that these advances promote range expansions in species with multiple reproductive cycles per year, but not in species with only one.

    • Callum J. Macgregor
    • , Chris D. Thomas
    •  & Jane K. Hill

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Most passerine bird species replace part of their plumage within the first year of life. Here, using data from 4,012 individuals of 19 species, Kiat et al. find that the extent of post-juvenile moult has increased over the past 212 years and this correlated with the global temperature increase in this period.

    • Y. Kiat
    • , Y. Vortman
    •  & N. Sapir

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A global warming hiatus occurred during 1998 and 2012 but its effects on phenology are unclear. Here the authors examine the trends in spring and autumn phenology in the northern hemisphere and the effects of the warming hiatus and show that phenology change rate in the northern hemisphere slowed down during the warming hiatus.

    • Xufeng Wang
    • , Jingfeng Xiao
    •  & Rachhpal S. Jassal

  • Article
    | Open Access

    For phenotypic plasticity to evolve to a changing world, there must be variation in plasticity. Here, the authors show that whether great tits advance or delay breeding in response to perceived predation risk depends on their personality, linking variation in plasticity with that in personality.

    • Robin N. Abbey-Lee
    •  & Niels J. Dingemanse

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phenotypic plasticity—the ability to express multiple phenotypes from the same genome—is a widespread adaptation to environmental variability. Here, Oostra et al analyze transcriptomes of an African butterfly with distinct seasonal phenotypes, and observe lack of variation for plasticity, limiting potential for evolutionary responses to climate change.

    • Vicencio Oostra
    • , Marjo Saastamoinen
    •  & Christopher W. Wheat

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plant growing season increases under a warming climate, but it is not known whether this will alter plant exposure to frost days. Here Liu et al. investigate trends in the Northern Hemisphere over 30 years and find increased exposure to frost days in regions that have longer growing seasons.

    • Qiang Liu
    • , Shilong Piao
    •  & Tao Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate oscillations affect weather on different temporal-spatial scales, which poses difficulty in understanding how they influence tree reproduction. Here Ascoli et al. show relationships between low- and high-frequency components of the NAO and masting in two European tree species across multiple decades.

    • Davide Ascoli
    • , Giorgio Vacchiano
    •  & Andrew Hacket-Pain

  • Article |

    The effect of lower Arctic sea ice levels on local terrestrial ecosystems is not well studied. Here Kerby and Post find that decreasing Arctic sea ice levels are associated with the early emergence of plant growth, which decouples plant growth from the birth of Caribou calves, and may be associated with increased calf mortality.

    • Jeffrey T. Kerby
    •  & Eric Post

  • Article |

    Climate change and increasing temperature have an impact on the flowering time of plants but models predicting these effects are lacking. Satake et al. provide a model based on differential gene expression to predict the response of plants to warmer temperatures and find that the flowering period is shortened.

    • Akiko Satake
    • , Tetsuhiro Kawagoe
    •  & Hiroshi Kudoh

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