Summary
Plants have evolved to time their leafing, flowering and fruiting in appropriate seasons for growth, reproduction and resting. As a consequence of their adaptation to geographically different environments, there is a rich diversity in plant phenology from temperate and tropical climates. Recent progress in genetic and molecular studies will provide numerous opportunities to study the genetic basis of phenological traits and the history of adaptation of phenological traits to seasonal and aseasonal environments. Integrating molecular data with long‐term phenology and climate data into predictive models will be a powerful tool to forecast future phenological changes in the face of global environmental change. Here, we review the cross‐scale approach from genes to plant communities from three aspects: the latitudinal gradient of plant phenology at the community level, the environmental and genetic factors underlying the diversity of plant phenology, and an integrated approach to forecast future plant phenology based on genetically informed knowledge. Synthesizing the latest knowledge about plant phenology from molecular, ecological and mathematical perspectives will help us understand how natural selection can lead to the further evolution of the gene regulatory mechanisms in phenological traits in future forest ecosystems.
There is an increasing potential to incorporate recent advances in our understanding of molecular‐genetic pathways of flowering‐time regulation to forecast shifts in flowering phenology in response to rising temperature. Recent studies developed models that integrate temperature and photoperiod signals into the network of floral regulatory genes, and predicted the shortening of flowering duration under warming based on the expression dynamics of major flowering‐time genes in the perennial herb Arabidopsis halleri subsp. gemmifera. Nevertheless, empirical testing of the model prediction is still lacking. We performed temperature manipulation experiments and common garden experiments to test the model predictions using plants from two distant populations of A. halleri. We also quantified expression levels of two major flowering‐time genes and compared the observed and predicted gene expression patterns. Our experiments in the laboratory and the field demonstrated that flowering duration of A. halleri was significantly shortened under warming conditions. Our results also revealed that the end of flowering was more sensitive to the climate warming than the onset of flowering in A. halleri. The observed gene expression dynamics in the warming condition were predicted well by the gene regulatory model. The transplant experiment of plants from Hokkaido, the northernmost island, to the subtropical field site in Okinawa, Japan, showed that plants flowered without significant activation of FLOWERING LOCUS T, a floral integrator crucial for the accelerated flowering in long days. The study suggested that the redundancy of flowering gene regulatory network could be beneficial to the persistence of flowering ability under extreme climatic conditions.
Three new species, Lithocarpus bidoupensis Ngoc & Tagane, L. congtroiensis Ngoc & Yahara, and L. hongiaoensis Ngoc & Binh are described from Bidoup-Nui Ba National Park, Central Highland of Vietnam. Morphological analyses and Maximum likelihood tree based on genome-wide SNPs support the distinction of those species from the previously known taxa in the region. The three new species are considered to be endemic to the Bidoup-Nui Ba National Park and the preliminary conservation status for each species is evaluated as Critically Endangered.
In angiosperms, flowering phenology varies widely among species. This interspecific variation in flowering phenology has been examined in a range of tropical and temperate forests. Initial comparative studies on trees in tropical forests distinguished two classes of flowering phenology (Janzen, 1971): mass flowering, in which individuals flower synchronously with short durations (Heinrich
A new species of Gentiana, Gentiana bolavenensis (Gentianaceae) is described from Dong Hua Sao National Protected Area in southern Laos, with photographs, a vernacular name and a preliminary conservation status.
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