Flowering Phenology Shifts in Response to Functional Traits, Growth Form, and Phylogeny of Woody Species in a Desert Area.

Yan Wang,Yan-Xin Long,Chang-Chun Xu,Guang-Hui Lv,Ya-Yun Wang,Yong-Gang Ma,Xiao-Dong Yang,Arshad Ali

doi:10.3389/fpls.2020.00536

Abstract

Climatic factors are considered the major driving forces for variation of flowering phenology among species. Yet, whether flowering phenology of woody species varies with functional traits, growth form, and phylogeny in arid regions is unknown. In the present study, we evaluated the relationships of three characteristics of flowering phenology (i.e., first flowering date, end of flowering date, and flowering duration) against functional traits, growth form, and phylogeny across 59 woody plant species across 3 years in Ürümqi city of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, in Northwest China. The results showed that, plant functional traits and growth form had significant influences on the variability of flowering phenology among species. The contributions of fruit type (34.7–43.5%) and flower color (30.1–30.7%) to the variability of flowering phenology were larger than those of pollination mode (4.6–14.4%), life form (8.4–14%) and maximum plant height (9.7–13.1%). Trees had the significant correlations in terms of flowering duration against first flowering date and end of flowering date, while shrubs showed the opposite pattern. The values of phylogenetic signal (Blomberg’s K) of the three characteristics of flowering phenology ranged from 0.36 to 0.43, which were significantly lower than the expectation of the Brownian motion model. Our results suggested that functional traits, growth form and phylogeny all affected variability of flowering phenology among species. Our results provide a new perspective for correctly evaluating the relationship between global climate change and plant reproduction.

Highlights

Flowering phenology, as the starting point of plant reproductive growth and an important phase of general phenology, is the core attribute of plants that allows them to cope with environmental changes and progeny reproduction (Cortés-Flores et al, 2017; König et al, 2017)
Flower color, fruit type, and pollination mode all significantly affected the variability of flowering phenology among species (P < 0.05) (Figure 1)
Fruit type made the highest contribution to variability of three characteristics of flowering phenology among species (34.7–43.5%), flower color made a moderate contribution (30.1– 30.7%), and pollination mode made the smallest contribution (4.6–14.4%) (Figure 1)

Summary

Introduction

As the starting point of plant reproductive growth and an important phase of general phenology, is the core attribute of plants that allows them to cope with environmental changes and progeny reproduction (Cortés-Flores et al, 2017; König et al, 2017). Previous studies have shown that plant functional traits affected the variation of flowering phenology among species (Petersen et al, 2010; Sun and Frelich, 2011; König et al, 2017) This may be because the combination of flowering phenology and functional traits is the intrinsic strategy of plants to reduce the environmental limitation on reproductive success (Jia et al, 2011). There is an ongoing debate regarding which type of functional traits combined with flowering phenology improves reproductive success (Jia et al, 2011; Cortés-Flores et al, 2017). Whether and which type of functional traits connect with flowering phenology in arid desert regions have not been studied

Methods

Results

Conclusion