Flowering and fruiting phenologies of seasonal and aseasonal neotropical forests: the role of annual changes in irradiance

By J. Zimmerman, Stephen J. Wright, O. Calderón, M. Pagan, Steven R Paton. Journal of Tropical Ecology, 2007

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The seasonality of both rainfall and solar irradiance might influence the evolution of flowering and fruiting in tropical forests. In seasonally dry forests, to the degree that soil moisture limits plant productivity, community-wide peaks in reproduction are expected during the rainy season, with seedfall and germination timed to allow seedlings to become well established while soil moisture is available. Where soil moisture is never seasonally limiting, seasonal changes in light availability caused by periods of cloudiness or seasonally low zenithal sun angles should favour reproduction during seasons when irradiance levels are high. To evaluate these predictions, we documented the timing of flower and fruit fall for 10 and 15 y at El Verde, Puerto Rico, and Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama. At El Verde, rainfall is abundant year-round and solar declination largely determines seasonal variation in irradiance. At BCI, rainfall is abundant throughout the 8-mo wet season while drought develops and average solar irradiance increases by 40–50% over the 4-mo dry season. Seasonal variation in the number of species flowering and fruiting at both sites was generally consistent with the hypothesis that seasonal variation in irradiance limits the evolution of reproductive phenologies. Community-level metrics provided no evidence for a similar role for moisture availability at BCI. Seasonal variation in irradiance also strongly influenced seed development times at both sites. Thus, community-wide phenologies reveal a strong signature of seasonal changes in irradiance, even in those forests that exhibit some degree of seasonality in rainfall.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e856f307c96ca0d753e2aae26857cf7a62dbffb6

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Citations in the corpus

Comparative Feeding Ecology of Sympatric Microcebus berthae and M. murinus (2008, background): “Most tropical dry forest trees tune their reproductive phenologies to moisture availability (van Schaik et al. 1993; Zimmerman et al. 2007).”
Seasonal variation in daily insolation induces synchronous bud break and flowering in the tropics (2010, background): “Studies establishing simple correlations between increasing irradiance and community-wide flowering lack the resolution necessary to identify the species-specific environmental cues inducing flowering or fruiting of tropical trees (van Schaik et al. 1993; Wright 1996; Zimmerman et al. 2007).”
Flowering Patterns in a Seasonal Tropical Lowland Forest in Western Amazonia (2008, background): “There is strong evidence showing how cloud cover and radiation affect fruit and flower production, as well as plant development (Wright & van Schaik 1994, Wright et al. 1999, Bettina et al. 2002, Graham et al. 2003, Stevenson 2004, Hamann 2004, Yeang 2007, Zimmerman et al. 2007).”
Tropical tree species assemblages in topographical habitats change in time and with life stage (2011, background): “…seed input of species shows high year-to-year variability and depends on fluctuations in flowering and fruiting, which are driven by El Niño events (Wright et al. 1999; Wright 2005), precipitation (Zimmerman et al. 2007) or abundance and distribution of seed dispersers (Dennis et al. 2005).”
Climate change, phenology, and phenological control of vegetation feedbacks to the climate system (2013, unknown): “, 2011) and aseasonal (Zimmerman et al., 2007; Zalamea and Gonzalez, 2008) tropical forests.”
Current issues in tropical phenology: a synthesis (2018, background): “A few long-term tropical phenology datasets, originally collected for other research questions, have since been analyzed to search for effects of climatic drivers or climate change (Chapman et al. 2005, Dunham et al. 2018, Polansky & Boesch 2013, Tutin & Fernandez 1993, Zimmerman et al. 2007).”