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Publication Details
AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS
SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH
Warming experiments underpredict plant phenological responses to climate change
Nature, Volume 485, No. 7399, Year 2012
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Description
Warming experiments are increasingly relied on to estimate plant responses to global climate change. For experiments to provide meaningful predictions of future responses, they should reflect the empirical record of responses to temperature variability and recent warming, including advances in the timing of flowering and leafing. We compared phenology (the timing of recurring life history events) in observational studies and warming experiments spanning four continents and 1,634 plant species using a common measure of temperature sensitivity (change in days per degree Celsius). We show that warming experiments underpredict advances in the timing of flowering and leafing by 8.5-fold and 4.0-fold, respectively, compared with long-term observations. For species that were common to both study types, the experimental results did not match the observational data in sign or magnitude. The observational data also showed that species that flower earliest in the spring have the highest temperature sensitivities, but this trend was not reflected in the experimental data. These significant mismatches seem to be unrelated to the study length or to the degree of manipulated warming in experiments. The discrepancy between experiments and observations, however, could arise from complex interactions among multiple drivers in the observational data, or it could arise from remediable artefacts in the experiments that result in lower irradiance and drier soils, thus dampening the phenological responses to manipulated warming. Our results introduce uncertainty into ecosystem models that are informed solely by experiments and suggest that responses to climate change that are predicted using such models should be re-evaluated. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
Authors & Co-Authors
Wolkovich, E. M.
United States, La Jolla
University of California, San Diego
Cook, Benjamin I.
United States, New York
Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies
United States, Palisades
Lamont-doherty Earth Observatory
Crimmins, Theresa M.
Unknown Affiliation
Betancourt, J. L.
United States, Reston
United States Geological Survey
Travers, Steven E.
United States, Fargo
North Dakota State University
Pau, Stephanie
United States, Santa Barbara
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
Regetz, James
United States, Santa Barbara
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
Davies, T. Jonathan
Canada, Montreal
Université Mcgill
Kraft, Nathan J.B.
Canada, Vancouver
The University of British Columbia
United States, College Park
University of Maryland, College Park
Ault, Toby R.
United States, Boulder
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Bolmgren, Kjell
Sweden, Uppsala
Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet
Sweden, Lund
Lunds Universitet
Mazer, Susan J.
United States, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
McGill, Brian J.
United States, Orono
University of Maine
Parmesan, Camille
United States, Austin
The University of Texas at Austin
United Kingdom, Plymouth
University of Plymouth
Salamin, Nicolas
Switzerland, Lausanne
Université de Lausanne Unil
Switzerland, Lausanne
Sib Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Cleland, Elsa E.
United States, La Jolla
University of California, San Diego
Statistics
Citations: 698
Authors: 16
Affiliations: 21
Identifiers
Doi:
10.1038/nature11014
ISSN:
14764687
Research Areas
Environmental