Greater deviation in daily temperature from historic normals translates to shorter durations of reproductive spring phenophases for understory plants

As plants continue to respond to global warming with phenological shifts, our understanding of the importance of extreme, but short-lived, heat events has lagged relative to our understanding of plant responses to broad shifts in mean climate conditions. Here, we explore the importance of extreme daily temperatures in driving phenology across fourteen species of spring-flowering woodland herbs spanning a broad geographic range. We uniquely harnessed the combined power of community science and public gardens, engaging more than 30 volunteers to monitor 198 individual plants biweekly across five botanic gardens in the midwestern and southeastern U.S. We tested two hypotheses. First, that the duration of individual phenophases would be shortened by high daily temperatures relative to the 30-year historical means (1991-2020). Second, these durations would vary among species. Our findings support both hypotheses. We observed significant inverse relationships between higher positive devi..., This dataset was collected by trained public volunteers at 5 botanical gardens/arboreta (Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, IL; Holden Arboretum, Kirtland, OH; Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO; Dawes Arboretum, Newark, OH; Huntsville Botanical Garden, Huntsville, AL) from March - October 2023. The data are observations of phenology (i.e., stage of phenology or 'phenophase') recorded by volunteers on a twice-weekly basis using the Chicago Botanic Garden smartphone app 'Budburst.', , # Greater deviation in daily temperature from historic normals translates to shorter durations of reproductive spring phenophases for understory plants

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jh9w0vtmh](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jh9w0vtmh)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset was collected by trained public volunteers at 5 botanical gardens/arboreta (Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, IL; Holden Arboretum, Kirtland, OH; Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO; Dawes Arboretum, Newark, OH; Huntsville Botanical Garden, Huntsville, AL) from March - October 2023. The data are observations of phenology (i.e., stage of phenology or 'phenophase') recorded by volunteers on a twice-weekly basis using the Chicago Botanic Garden smartphone app 'Budburst.' 

Data were originally posted on the Budburst website ([https://budburst.org/)](https://budburst.org/\)) as they were uploaded by each volunteer (user). The first author was able to access and download these publicly-available ...,