PS: Happy to send a PDF to anyone interested without online access!

Together, these results demonstrate that shifts in phenology and species ranges act synergistically to restructure the flowering seasons across the conterminous United States, revealing wide variation in the pace and direction of change among biomes.

Using millions of records, we show that phenological and range shifts affect different attributes of the season: phenological shifts primarily alter the start, end, and duration of the season; range shifts alter co-flowering diversity at seasonal peaks and the network of overlapping flowering pairs

Shifts in phenology and species ranges are likely to have distinct and synergistic effects on community-level flowering patterns. However these processes have typically been studied in isolation largely due to data limitations.

Thanks, Tom! Feel free to reach out with any thoughts or questions

p.s. Huge shoutout to my co-authors Isaac Park, Sydne Record, Charles Davis, Aaron Ellison, and my advisor Susan Mazer for their amazing collaboration on this project!

For more details on / discussion of these and other cool results, you can access the full text in the following link:

rdcu.be/dvJvT

Whether phenological reaction norms to historical T° conditions will remain adaptive under future climatic regimes is unclear. Nonetheless, our results suggest that plasticity might have historically enabled rapid phenological acclimation to a wide range of T° conditions

The predominant role of plasticity was consistent among species distributed across climatic space and among ecoregions of the United States. However, the relative contributions of plasticity and adaptation varied markedly among species flowering at different times of the year

We found that, among species, sensitivity patterns were much more frequently consistent with plasticity than local adaptation, but both plasticity and adaptation jointly mediated clinal variation in phenology in many species

We used >1 million flowering specimens collected over 120yr representing 1,605 species to measure flowering sensitivity to T° over space and time, inferring the relative contributions of plasticity and adaptation to observed variation along T° gradients

Phenology varies widely over space and time due to climate, but it is unclear whether this variation (which often affects fitness) is primarily generated by rapid organismal responses (i.e., plasticity) or local adaptation