Synchronous species responses reveal phenological guilds: implications for management

Abstract

Phenological studies are critical for understanding the ability of terrestrial ecosystems to respond to changes in climate. Monitoring seasonal transitions at the species or community level across large areas is challenging and expensive. One approach for lowering costs is to identify phenological guilds—groups of species that exhibit similar timing of seasonal transitions—and limit monitoring to a smaller number of species within a guild. In this study, we evaluated 23 consecutive years of monthly observations of individual species at 15 long‐term study sites at the Jornada Basin USDA‐Long‐Term Ecological Research site to identify patterns in the onset of three phenophases—leaf‐out, flower, and fruit—of 16 widely occurring species in the arid southwestern United States and to investigate the existence of phenological guilds. We conducted univariate analyses of distributions in the timing of leaf, flower, and fruit production across time and space and multivariate cluster analysis of the time series to identify coherent groups of species–site instances that exhibit coherence in timing of phenophase onsets (i.e., guilds). The six species of C3 shrubs demonstrated greater consistency in timing of all phenophases relative to C4 grasses. Further, we found that in all species, leaf‐out occurred prior to the onset of the summer monsoon rains. Cluster analysis revealed six groups of species–site observations demonstrating high within‐year concordance in timing of leaf‐out and first fruit across variable site conditions and rainfall years. The six groups for timing of first fruit differed from those for first leaf in that they exhibited greater multi‐species membership and within‐year variability in timing. We propose that use of phenological guilds can improve the efficiency of ecosystem monitoring, predictive models of ecosystem cues driving phenological events, and land management outcomes.

Phenological Patterns and Seasonal Segregation of Coprophilous Beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeoidea and Hydrophilidae) on a Cattle Farm in SE-Michigan, United States Throughout the Year

“…Coprophilous beetles are valuable bioindicators of habitat quality due to their dependency on animal excrements and are therefore well suited to monitor and evaluate conservation measures (Waßmer, 1995;Favila and Halffter, 1997;McGeoch et al, 2002;Alvarado et al, 2019;Raine and Slade, 2019;Carvalho et al, 2020). As the seasonal abundance patterns of many species are heavily influenced by the man-made climate crisis (Chuine, 2010;Wolkovich and Cleland, 2014;Brown et al, 2016;Wilsey et al, 2018), detailed phenologies and segregation patterns of the species and functional guilds within local communities of coprophilous beetles are an important tool informing the management of these vital agricultural (Chmielewski, 2003;Ruml and Vulić, 2005) and natural resources (Denny et al, 2014;Enquist et al, 2014;Bradford et al, 2018;Browning et al, 2018) and are essential for guiding effective conservation efforts (Escobar et al, 2008;Rosemartin et al, 2014;Morellato et al, 2016).…”

Integrating space and time: a case for phenological context in grazing studies and management

“…Rangelands are defined as landscapes on which the natural vegetation is dominated by grasses, forbs and shrubs, and that are managed as natural ecosystems [15] . Plant functional groups that occur on rangelands (e.g., C 4 and C 3 grasses and forbs, and C 3 shrubs) have distinct phenological or life cycle patterns that reflect differences in growing season stages such as greenup and drydown [16,17] .…”

Constraints on shrub cover and shrub–shrub competition in a U.S. southwest desert

“…The May 2011 image date coincides with peak shrub canopy greenness which occurs before peak grass greenness in summer months (Browning et al. ), maximizing our capacity to identify shrub cover. An unsupervised approach (Iterative Self‐Organizing Data Analysis Technique) was used for image classification.…”