Using Herbarium Record to Estimate Flowering Time Shifts Across Bioclimatic Regions
Start Date
3-11-2024 4:00 PM
Abstract
Over the last 100 years climate change has had an observed effect on plant phenology including flowering time. Many studies have been conducted to show this connection, yet none have examined flowering time changes across multiple bioclimatic regions and on a large geographic scale. We expect that a number of geographic features such as elevation and the proximity of large water bodies might affect the impact of flowering times, but we have little knowledge of the effects of geographic location on changes in plant flowering time due to climate change. We addressed these gaps in our knowledge by mapping herbarium collection records of Ranunculus Occidentalis across a broad geographic range along the West Coast of North America. We assumed that herbarium collection dates provided reasonable estimates of flowering time for each location and date. We estimated two interpolated surfaces based on points from pre 1970 and post 1970, and calculated the difference between the surface to examine location-specific changes in flowering time. We found a variation in flowering time changes from little to no change to several weeks. We are working to add more species to the database to fill in gaps and to provide more accurate estimates of habitat-specific flowering time shifts across Western North America.
Subjects
Climate Change, GIS / modeling, Plant ecology
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/41402
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Using Herbarium Record to Estimate Flowering Time Shifts Across Bioclimatic Regions
Over the last 100 years climate change has had an observed effect on plant phenology including flowering time. Many studies have been conducted to show this connection, yet none have examined flowering time changes across multiple bioclimatic regions and on a large geographic scale. We expect that a number of geographic features such as elevation and the proximity of large water bodies might affect the impact of flowering times, but we have little knowledge of the effects of geographic location on changes in plant flowering time due to climate change. We addressed these gaps in our knowledge by mapping herbarium collection records of Ranunculus Occidentalis across a broad geographic range along the West Coast of North America. We assumed that herbarium collection dates provided reasonable estimates of flowering time for each location and date. We estimated two interpolated surfaces based on points from pre 1970 and post 1970, and calculated the difference between the surface to examine location-specific changes in flowering time. We found a variation in flowering time changes from little to no change to several weeks. We are working to add more species to the database to fill in gaps and to provide more accurate estimates of habitat-specific flowering time shifts across Western North America.