11 November 2019 in Nature Ecology & Evolution
Plant and animal phenology is shifting in response to urbanization, with most hypotheses focusing on the ‘urban heat island’ (UHI) effect as the driver. However, generalities regarding the direction and magnitude of phenological response to urbanization have not yet emerged because most studies have focused on remote-sensed vegetative phenologies or at local scales with relatively few species. Furthermore, how urbanization interacts with broad-scale climate gradients remains an unknown but important component of anthropogenically driven phenological change. Here, we used a database with >22 million in situ plant phenological observations from the United States and Europe to study the joint influence of varying human population density, which serves as an urbanization measure, and of regional temperature on median flowering and leaf-out dates across a wide plant phylogenetic spectrum. Separately, increasing population density and warmer regional temperature both advanced plant flowering and leaf-out. However, the influence of human population density on plant flowering and leaf-out depends on the regional temperature: high population density advanced plant phenology in cold areas but this effect disappeared or even reversed in warm areas. UHI effects (as measured by daily land surface temperature) alone cannot explain the overall influence of urbanization on plant phenology, suggesting that urbanization also affects plant phenology via other mechanisms. Shorter plants with large specific leaf areas and early flower or leaf-out dates were most affected by urbanization and temperature changes. Our study provides strong empirical evidence that the influence of urbanization on plant phenology varies with regional temperature. Therefore, robust understanding and accurate prediction of phenological changes must take this interaction into account.
1 October 2018 in Ecography
19 September 2022 in Nature Ecology & Evolution
29 March 2023 in Ecology Letters
Research on island species–area relationships (ISAR) has expanded to incorporate functional (IFDAR) and phylogenetic (IPDAR) diversity. However, relative to the ISAR, we know little about IFDARs and IPDARs, and lack synthetic global analyses of variation in form of these three categories of island diversity–area relationship (IDAR). Here, we undertake the first comparative evaluation of IDARs at the global scale using 51 avian archipelagic data sets representing true and habitat islands. Using null models, we explore how richness‐corrected functional and phylogenetic diversity scale with island area. We also provide the largest global assessment of the impacts of species introductions and extinctions on the IDAR. Results show that increasing richness with area is the primary driver of the (non‐richness corrected) IPDAR and IFDAR for many data sets. However, for several archipelagos, richness‐corrected functional and phylogenetic diversity changes linearly with island area, suggesting that the dominant community assembly processes shift along the island area gradient. We also find that archipelagos with the steepest ISARs exhibit the biggest differences in slope between IDARs, indicating increased functional and phylogenetic redundancy on larger islands in these archipelagos. In several cases introduced species seem to have ‘re‐calibrated’ the IDARs such that they resemble the historic period prior to recent extinctions.
20 May 2019 in Global Ecology and Biogeography