Plant phenological sensitivity to climate change on the Tibetan Plateau and relative to other areas of the world

Abstract

Abstract Global warming and changes in precipitation are altering the phenology of plants that significantly impact the functioning and services of ecosystems. Although a number of studies have addressed responses of plant phenology to warming and altered precipitation individually, their interactions can alter plant phenology differently than either does independently. To explore how the interactions between global change drivers alter alpine ecosystems, we conducted a factorial experiment manipulating warming (ambient and +2°C) and altered precipitation (50% decrease, control, and 50% increase) simultaneously in an alpine meadow on the Tibetan Plateau. Over two years, we monitored plant phenological events, leaf‐out day and first flowering day, for 11 common plant species that account for 74.4% of the total above biomass. Surprisingly, there was no interaction between warming and changes in precipitation on community plant phenology, but warming advanced leaf‐out and first flowering day by 7.10 and 9.79 d, respectively. Unlike the community response, plant functional groups had a variety of direct and interactive responses to the experimental climate drivers. While the phenology of legumes was most influenced by temperature, temperature and precipitation interacted to alter the phenology of grasses and forbs. To explore how plant phenological sensitivity on the Tibetan Plateau is compared with other meadow ecosystems, we combined our dataset with a global plant phenology dataset. Interestingly, the phenological sensitivity of leaf‐out day and first flowering day on the Tibetan Plateau is 7.3 and 37.8 times greater than global phenological sensitivity, respectively. This result highlights that a meta‐analysis of global phenological sensitivity may significantly underestimate change in some regions—even regions as large as the Tibetan Plateau. Together, our results suggest that the Tibetan Plateau may experience rapid change as temperatures warm and that these changes will likely be more rapid than in other regions of the world. Further, our study highlights that if we are to make accurate predictions of how plant phenology may change with warming, we need to understand the specific environmental cues that drive phenological responses across different areas.

Keywords

• alpine meadow
• altered precipitation
• climate change
• global warming
• phenological sensitivity
• plant functional groups