Assessing Plant Phenological Patterns in Tropical Brazil 1901–2020

Phenology is a key biological trait of an organism’s success and is one of the best indicators of its response to recent climate change. Plants are among the most well-studied organisms in this regard, but observational data bearing on this topic are largely restricted to species of the northern hemisphere, mostly from ca. the last three decades. Phenological data from tropical latitudes are especially lacking. Recent research has demonstrated that mobilized online herbarium specimens provide important, albeit mostly neglected, information on plant phenology. Here, we use the web tool CrowdCurio to crowdsource phenological data from nearly 35,000 herbarium specimens representing 260 flowering plant species broadly distributed across tropical Brazil. Our results, spanning 120 years and generated from over 1000 crowdsourcers, clarify numerous aspects of tropical plant phenology. First, they reveal that plant reproductive timing is exceptionally diverse across tropical biomes and taxa. Second, they identify that phenological responses to climate are variable across taxa and biomes. Third, among those species with broad latitudinal ranges, populations from more southern latitudes are significantly more phenologically sensitive to precipitation than those from northern populations. Our results are robust to a variety of confounding factors and span large phylogenetic distances and various life histories. These may represent more global trends in the latitudinal gradient of tropical phenological response with myriad potential ecological and evolutionary consequences. This dataset may be used for non-commercial purposes. Please provide the following attribution: Davis, C., Lyra, G., Park, D., Zhang, H., Asprino, R., Maruyama, R., Torquato, D., Cook, B., Xie, J., Ellison, A. 2022. Assessing plant phenological patterns in tropical Brazil 1901–2020. Harvard Forest Data Archive: HF427. Please note that the license we provide does not apply to images linked from the data set. Please check each content provider’s online documentation to see what licenses may be provided and what terms and restrictions they impose.