Collaborative Research: MRA: Modeling and forecasting phenology across spatiotemporal and taxonomic scales using ecological observatory and mobilized digital herbarium data

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Environmental change of all kinds – including climate change, urbanization, and wildfire – affects the seasonal timing of life cycle events in plants worldwide. Most notable are the effects of environmental conditions on the seasonal onset and duration of flowering. The timing of flowering within and among species is important for the persistence of natural populations because it affects interactions between plants, and the availability of flowers and fruits for the animals that depend on them. But the effects of environmental change on flowering differ among species and regions. This project aims to understand and forecast changes in flowering and fruiting among thousands of different plant species across the continental U.S.A. This project takes full advantage of millions of observations of flowering times collected by scientists working with the National Ecological Observation Network (NEON) and citizen-scientists contributing observations from their homes, neighborhoods, and public lands to the National Phenology Network (NPN). The researchers will augment these records of flowering times with the data from millions more herbarium specimens that are available on-line to detect the responses of flowering times to the past century of climate change. These observations will be combined with soil quality, plant cover, land use history, climate, and disturbance data to better understand how different environmental conditions influence species-specific and regional flowering times. Finally, the researchers will use statistical models to forecast short and long-term changes in future flowering times. The combined dataset will be a valuable resource available to other researchers examining the effects of environmental change on plant species and community traits. In addition, the research will provide educational opportunities for K-12, undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers. The project will also engage citizen-scientists who will contribute to a database of flowering times observed from herbarium collections through the CrowdCurio crowdsourcing platform.Plant phenology–the seasonal timing of key developmental events–is essential for species’ reproductive success. However, critical gaps remain in our understanding of phenology across space, time, and taxa. Increasingly, online herbaria and associated data are being mobilized to address these knowledge gaps because they provide extensive data that can be used to detect phenological responses to climatic change within and among biomes, functional groups, and taxonomic groups. In this project, the standardized, replicated, and focused phenological observations provided by NEON and the USA National Phenology Network will be harmonized for the first time with the taxonomic, spatial, and geographic breadth of herbarium data. First, flowering times derived from herbarium specimens will be assembled and augmented to include 4400 plant species that collectively span much of the continental US, with specific attention to key regions that have been digitized but overlooked: prairie, alpine, and urban biomes. Second, sources of variation in phenology within and among species, geographic regions, and higher taxa, and the effects of numerous understudied extrinsic factors (e.g., fire history, soil quality, disturbance) will be modeled. Third, forecasts of near- and long-term changes in the phenological behavior of populations, species, and communities will be modeled to better understand phenological responses at multiple ecological, phylogenetic, and temporal scales. Collectively, these efforts will help to elucidate plausible mechanistic responses to climatic and geographic factors that will determine species’ future phenology.This project is jointly funded by the Division of Environmental Biology/Macrosystems Biology and NEON-enabled Science Program and the Division of Biological Infrastructure/Capacity: Cyberinfrastructure Program.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.