Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 23, Issue 12, Pages 1820-1826Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ele.13609
Keywords
Flowering phenology; flowering synchrony; mast seeding; pollen addition; wind pollination
Categories
Funding
- Polish National Science Centre [2017/24/C/NZ8/00151]
- MICNN project [AGL2014-54739-R]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Synchronised and quasi-periodic production of seeds by plant populations, known as masting, is implicated in many ecological processes, but how it arises remains poorly understood. Flowering and pollination dynamics are hypothesised to provide the mechanistic link for the observed relationship between weather and population-level seed production. We report the first experimental test of the phenological synchrony hypotheses as a driver of pollen limitation in mast seeding oaks (Quercus ilex). Higher flowering synchrony yielded greater pollination efficiency, which resulted in 2-fold greater seed set in highly synchronised oaks compared to asynchronous individuals. Pollen addition removed the negative effect of asynchronous flowering on seed set. Because phenological synchrony operates through environmental variation, this result suggests that oak masting is synchronised by exogenous rather than endogenous factors. It also points to a mechanism by which changes in flowering phenology can affect plant reproduction of mast-seeding plants, with subsequent implications for community dynamics.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available