Climate change increases flowering duration, driving phenological reassembly and elevated co-flowering richness

Changes to flowering phenology are a key response of plants to climate change. However, we know little about how these changes alter temporal patterns of reproductive overlap (i.e., phenological reassembly).

We combined long-term field (1937-2012) and herbarium records (1850-2017) of 68 species in a flowering plant community in central North America and used a novel application of Bayesian quantile regression to estimate changes to flowering season length, altered richness and composition of co-flowering assemblages, and whether phenological shifts exhibit seasonal trends.

Across the past century, phenological shifts increased species’ flowering durations by 11.5 d on average, which resulted in 94% of species experiencing greater flowering overlap at the community level. Increases to co-flowering were particularly pronounced in autumn, driven by a greater tendency of late-season species to shift the ending of flowering later and to increase flowering duration.

Our results demonstrate that species-level phenological shifts can result in considerable phenological reassembly and highlights changes to flowering duration as a prominent, yet underappreciated, effect of climate change. The emergence of an autumn co-flowering mode emphasizes that these effects may be season-dependent.