Phylogenetic conservatism in plant phenology

By T. Jonathan Davies, E. Wolkovich, Nathan J B Kraft, Nicolas Salamin, Jenica M. Allen, T. Ault, J. Betancourt, K. Bolmgren, E. Cleland, B. Cook and 7 more. Journal of Ecology, 2013

216 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Phenological events – defined points in the life cycle of a plant or animal – have been regarded as highly plastic traits, reflecting flexible responses to various environmental cues. The ability of a species to track, via shifts in phenological events, the abiotic environment through time might dictate its vulnerability to future climate change. Understanding the predictors and drivers of phenological change is therefore critical. Here, we evaluated evidence for phylogenetic conservatism – the tendency for closely related species to share similar ecological and biological attributes – in phenological traits across flowering plants. We aggregated published and unpublished data on timing of first flower and first leaf, encompassing ˜4000 species at 23 sites across the Northern Hemisphere. We reconstructed the phylogeny for the set of included species, first, using the software program Phylomatic, and second, from DNA data. We then quantified phylogenetic conservatism in plant phenology within and across sites. We show that more closely related species tend to flower and leaf at similar times. By contrasting mean flowering times within and across sites, however, we illustrate that it is not the time of year that is conserved, but rather the phenological responses to a common set of abiotic cues. Our findings suggest that species cannot be treated as statistically independent when modelling phenological responses. Synthesis. Closely related species tend to resemble each other in the timing of their life‐history events, a likely product of evolutionarily conserved responses to environmental cues. The search for the underlying drivers of phenology must therefore account for species' shared evolutionary histories.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eccb304afe7d6dd04596aee0dfbcbcc142bbad1d

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Citations in the corpus

Advances in flowering phenology across the Northern Hemisphere are explained by functional traits (2018, background): “We also added an extensive dataset on changes in climate derived from global climate databases because temperature is not the only climate variable shown to be crucial for phenological reactions (Davies et al., 2013; Wolkovich et al., 2012).”
Evolutionary Legacy Effects on Ecosystems: Biogeographic Origins, Plant Traits, and Implications for Management in the Era of Global Change (2016, background): “Davies et al. (2013) point out this potential paradox and argue that closely related species might share similar phenologies either because close relatives share the same genetic mechanisms driving phenology and/or because they grow in, and are adapted to, similar environments.”