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Climate warming–driven phenological shifts are species-specific in woody plants: evidence from twig experiment in Kashmir Himalaya

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Abstract

Experimental evidences in support of climate warming–driven phenological shifts are still scarce, particularly from the developing world. Here, we investigated the effect of experimental warming on flowering phenology of selected woody plants in Kashmir Himalaya. We selected the twigs of four congeneric pairs of temperate woody species (Prunus, Populus, Ulmus, Viburnum)—typical spring-flowering plants in the region. Using randomised block design, we monitored these winter dormant twigs in controlled growth chambers to study the effect of different temperature regimes (9, 17, 20 and 23 °C) and species identity on the patterns of phenological shifts. We observed a significant phenological shift in all the species showing preponement in the first flower out and senescence phases ranging from 0.56 to 3.0 and 0.77 to 4.04 days per degree increase in temperature, respectively. The duration of flowering phase in all the species showed a corresponding decrease along the gradient of increasing temperature, which was more driven by preponement of the flower senescence than the start of flowering. The patterns of phenological shifts were highly species-specific, and the magnitude of these shifts significantly varied in all the four pairs of congeneric species despite their phylogenetic similarity. Our study provides experimental support to the previous long-term observation and herbarium-based studies showing that the patterns of phenological shifts in response to global climate warming are likely to vary between species, even those belonging to same evolutionary stock. Our findings highlight that a one-size-fits-all strategy to manage the likely impacts of climate warming–induced phenological shifts will seldom succeed, and should instead be designed for the specific phenological responses of species and regions.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are highly thankful to the research scholars and supporting staff of the Centre for Biodiversity and Taxonomy, University of Kashmir, for their kind help and support during the present study. We also acknowledge the growth chamber facility provided by Molecular Biology and Tissue Culture Laboratories at Department of Botany, University of Kashmir. We are grateful to Prof. Richard Primack and Carina Terry from Boston University for useful suggestions on the draft manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported in the form of Research Fellowship to Tabasum Hassan, Sajad A. Wani and Ruquia Gulzar received under UGC-MANF, CSIR-UGC and CSIR-India respectively.

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Contributions

AAK conceived the research idea and supervised the study; TH collected the plant material and conducted the experiment with help from RG and AAK. RA and SAW1 conducted data analysis and interpreted the results; TH, AAK and RA led manuscript writing with inputs from SAW2. TH, RA and AAK contributed in revision. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript for submission.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anzar Ahmad Khuroo.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Hassan, T., Ahmad, R., Wani, S.A. et al. Climate warming–driven phenological shifts are species-specific in woody plants: evidence from twig experiment in Kashmir Himalaya. Int J Biometeorol 66, 1771–1785 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-022-02317-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-022-02317-y

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