No risk – no fun: Penalty and recovery from spring frost damages in deciduous temperate trees

Phenological shifts in response to changing climatic conditions are a key acclimation process for the persistence of perennial plants in temperate and boreal climates. The optimal time to leaf-out is the result of evolutionary processes determined by the trade-off between minimizing the risk of freezing damages and herbivory pressure while maximizing resource uptake to increase competitiveness against the other plants.
We quantified the penalty exerted by frost exposure at the time of leaf emergence on plant development (reduction in leaf area, canopy duration, and growth) over the potential gains without frost (increased biomass and non-structural carbohydrate reserves), depending on when leaf-out occurs. To this purpose, we exposed 960 saplings of four temperate deciduous tree species with contrasting cold hardiness to two frost intensities shortly after leaf emergence, which was artificially induced at four occasions to reflect the whole range of natural leaf-out dates.
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