Assessing seasonal richness of active flowers throughout UC Reserve sites in the 20th Century

Plant species are well documented to alter both the timing and duration of their flowering in response to changing climate.  Plant species often exhibit different magnitudes or directions of phenological responses to climate changes from each other.  These shifts may have cumulative effects on the diversity of species in flower throughout a given flowering season, resulting in periods of high or low species richness of actively flowering community members that differ from those that occurred under historical conditions.  
In this study we model the effects of warming throughout the past century on the daily species richness of actively flowering species by developing species-specific phenoclimate models for 1,848 plant species documented to inhabit 16 well documented plant communities across California.  These communities encompassed a variety of distinct vegetation types, ranging from coastal marshes and grasslands to chaparral shrublands and mountainous conife..., The University of California Reserve sites used in this study consisted of all UC reserves for which plant lists were available, and for which the local floras included at least 100 angiosperm taxa. Plant lists used in this study were posted on-line by each reserve and assembled by Brian Haggerty and Susan J. Mazer (https://ucnrs.org/a-flora-for-the-nrs/z). To ensure that each site represented a community of plants located within a small enough area that they might reasonably be considered sympatric or be accessible to shared pollinators, we further excluded all reserve sites covering areas exceeding 3,000 ha, or in which the range of elevations within the site exceeded 250 meters. The remaining sites included 16 distinct locations distributed across California, including both coastal, inland, and mountainous sites, and represented a range of ecoregions and vegetation classes.
Herbarium Data
Records of flowering phenology used in this study were drawn from 9,216,145 digital specimen r..., , # Assessing seasonal richness of active flowers throughout UC Reserve sites in the 20th Century

This README.txt file was generated on 2024-08-01 by Isaac Park

GENERAL INFORMATION

1\. Title of Dataset: Community-Level flowering phenology patterns among University of California Reserves

2\. Author Information Isaac W. Park, Department of Biology, Georgia Southern University; Tadeo Ramirez-Parada, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California Santa Barbara; Susan J. Mazer, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California Santa Barbara

3\. Date of data collection 10/10/2023:

4\. Geographic location of data collection: California, USA, models trained on data from throughout North America

5\. Development of these datasets and associated python code were supported by the National Science Foundation

SHARING/ACCESS INFORMATION

1\. Licenses/restrictions placed on the data: Public Domain

2\. Links to publications that cite or...,