Climatic niche and flowering and fruiting phenology of an epiphytic plant

Abstract

Each species passes through various life stages, and each life stage may have different requirements in terms of climate, soil, topography or other abiotic factors. The phenological stage is one such critical life stage in the plant life cycle. We examined the availability of optimal ecophysiological parameters in 22 years of high temporal climate data during the flowering and fruiting stage of an epiphytic plant, Spanish Moss, with a hemisphere-wide distribution. We used herbarium specimens to establish the flowering period. We found that most populations experience sub-optimal conditions in at least one environmental dimension and most populations are constrained by minimum temperature during the flowering/fruiting stage.

Vascular Epiphytes: The Ugly Duckling of Phenological Studies

“…1), the area with the highest epiphyte diversity in the world; eight (7 %) reported data from Asia and the Pacific which hold the second place in terms of global epiphyte diversity, and four (4 %) were localized in Africa, the continent with the lowest epiphyte diversity (Madison, 1977;Benzing, 1990;Zotz, 2016), and one in Australia (1 %), where vascular epiphyte flora has partially been explored (Wallace, 1981). This totals 105 articles after excluding the studies by Barve et al (2015) and Hietz (2010), since the first used herbarium data for all the Americas and therefore extends beyond the Neotropical area, and the latter is a report about xeric fern species from all around the world.…”

“…From the 107 studies, we found only five that explicitly explore the correlation between flowering phenology and proximal factors considering: maximum temperature, minimum temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, and/or solar radiation (Lasso and Ackerman, 2003;Marques et al, 2004;Ramírez and Briceño, 2011;Barve et al, 2015;Cascante-Marín et al, 2017). The possible effects of these correlations are only discussed in the Texier et al (2018) study, while the effects of pollinators on flowering is only mentioned in the studies by Zimmerman et al (1989) and Cascante-Marín et al (2017).…”

The Pressure Is On – Epiphyte Water-Relations Altered Under Elevated CO2

“…Their abundance and species richness is usually highest in tropical and sub-tropical regions ( Benzing, 1987 ; Zotz, 2016 ), but can also be impressive in temperate zones ( Zotz, 2005 ). High relative air humidity (RH) and high temperatures have often been associated with the high abundance and species richness of epiphytes ( Johansson, 1974 ; Cardelus et al, 2006 ; Gehrig-Downie et al, 2011 ; Barve et al, 2015 ).…”