Phenological Shifts in Temperate Forest Species Under Warming Climate Conditions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22801581Keywords:
plant phenology, budburst, spring leaf-out, autumn senescence, climate warming, temperate forest, long-term phenological network, in-situ warming experiment, growing season length, chilling requirementAbstract
Warming-driven shifts in the timing of budburst, flowering and autumn senescence are among the most widely
documented biological responses to climate change, yet the degree to which species differ in their sensitivity, and
whether passive observational trends agree with the response measured under experimental warming, remains
incompletely resolved for temperate forest communities. We combined 42 years (1981-2022) of ground-observed
phenological records from 45 long-term monitoring sites spanning a 9 degree latitudinal and 1450 m elevational
gradient across Finland, Sweden and France with a six-year (2017-2022) in-situ canopy warming experiment
(infrared heating, +2.2 degrees Celsius above ambient) replicated at two of these sites, covering six dominant
woody species: European beech (Fagus sylvatica), pedunculate oak (Quercus robur), silver birch (Betula pendula),
sycamore maple (Acer pseudoplatanus), common ash (Fraxinus excelsior) and the understory shrub hazel (Corylus
avellana). Across the monitoring network, mean spring budburst advanced by 3.1 days per decade (network-wide
linear mixed-model estimate, 95% confidence interval 2.4-3.8), with species-specific advances ranging from 1.6
days per decade in Quercus robur to 4.9 days per decade in Corylus avellana, while autumn leaf colouring and
abscission were delayed by a mean of 1.8 days per decade, yielding a net growing-season extension averaging 4.9
days per decade. The warming experiment produced budburst advances consistent in direction but systematically
smaller in magnitude than those implied by the observational network's temperature sensitivity for four of six
species, with the largest observational-experimental divergence in Fagus sylvatica. Chilling fulfilment, estimated
from winter temperature records at each site, explained a significant share of interannual variation in spring forcing
requirement in Fagus sylvatica and Quercus robur but not in the three earlier-flushing species, indicating that
photoperiod and forcing temperature dominate their spring response. These results demonstrate genuine,
ecologically meaningful interspecific variation in phenological sensitivity within a single regional forest community
and indicate that short-term experimental warming may under-represent the long-term realised sensitivity of species
whose spring phenology is jointly constrained by winter chilling and spring forcing.
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