Data from: 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.