Summary Flower and seed production of plants can be greatly influenced by both natural climatic oscillations and local weather extremes. However, owing to the rarity of long‐term monitoring studies conducted at a sufficient temporal scale to capture climatic oscillations and the unpredictability of extreme weather events, evidence that demonstrates how these two external forcings act in concert to drive plant reproduction remains scarce. In addition, considerable variation in species' phenological responses to the external climatic forcings was often observed. Phylogenetic relationships may mediate this interspecific variation, but previous studies yielded inconsistent results when testing this hypothesis. We monitored the flower and seed production in a subtropical rain forest, Fushan, Taiwan (24°45′N, 121°35′E), for over 10 years (since September 2002). In March 2005, a record low temperature (−1.3 °C) occurred at Fushan and caused great frost damage to plants. We used weekly phenological records and long‐term meteorological data to assess the effects of climatic fluctuations and extreme weather event on plant reproductive output. We show that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) indices, which integrated local climatic variables at Fushan over several months, were strongly associated with flower and seed production. The 2005 spring frost also had long‐lasting effects on the flower and seed production of several species. In particular, we detected phylogenetic signals in the relationships between phenological responses of flowering production and several climatic variables (maximum temperature, irradiance and ENSO34 index). By contrast, the relationships between seed production and climatic variables, as well as phenological responses to the frost event, did not exhibit a phylogenetic signal. Synthesis. Our findings add to the growing evidence that together the natural climatic oscillation (ENSO) and the extreme weather event (frost) determined the temporal variation in flower and seed production. In addition, phylogenetically closely related species resembled each other in their flowering responses to abiotic variation in this subtropical rain forest. Improved understanding of these abiotic and biotic interactions may help predicting population‐ and community‐level phenological responses under future climate changes.

The world’s coral reefs are experiencing increasing volatility in coral cover, largely because of anthropogenic environmental change, highlighting the need to understand how such volatility will influence the structure and dynamics of reef assemblages. These changes may influence not only richness or evenness but also the temporal stability of species’ relative abundances (temporal beta-diversity). Here, we analyzed reef fish assemblage time series from the Great Barrier Reef to show that, overall, 75% of the variance in abundance among species was attributable to persistent differences in species’ long-term mean abundances. However, the relative importance of stochastic fluctuations in abundance was higher on reefs that experienced greater volatility in coral cover, whereas it did not vary with drivers of alpha-diversity. These findings imply that increased coral cover volatility decreases temporal stability in relative abundances of fishes, a transformation that is not detectable from static measures of biodiversity.