Current issues in tropical phenology: a synthesis

Abstract

We retrace the development of tropical phenology research, compare temperate phenology study to that in the tropics and highlight the advances currently being made in this flourishing discipline. The synthesis draws attention to how fundamentally different tropical phenology data can be to temperate data. Tropical plants lack a phase of winter dormancy and may grow and reproduce continually. Seasonal patterns in environmental parameters, such as rainfall, irradiance or temperature, do not necessarily coincide temporally, as they do in temperate climes. We review recent research on the drivers of phenophase cycles in individual trees, species and communities and highlight how significant innovations in biometric tools and approaches are being driven by the need to deal with circular data, the complexity of defining tropical seasons and the myriad growth and reproductive strategies used by tropical plants. We discuss how important the use of leaf phenology (or remotely‐sensed proxies of leaf phenophases) has become in tracking biome responses to climate change at the continental level and how important the phenophase of forests can be in determining local weather conditions. We also highlight how powerful analyses of plant responses are hampered at many tropical sites by a lack of contextual data on local environmental conditions. We conclude by arguing that there is a clear global benefit in increasing long term tropical phenology data collection and improving empirical collection of local climate measures, contemporary to the phenology data. Directing more resources to research in this sector will be widely beneficial.

Inter‐annual variability of fruit timing and quantity at Nouragues (French Guiana): insights from hierarchical Bayesian analyses

“…We need longer phenological records from Amazonia as well as other tropical areas (Abernethy et al . ). The combination of long‐term monitoring of plant phenology and local climate, detailed studies of the physiological mechanisms behind reproduction and seedling emergence, compelling statistical tools, and multidisciplinary research including climatologists, physiologists, and ecologists will be required to understand the implications of a changing atmosphere and climate for tropical forest plants.…”

Estimating seed dispersal distance: A comparison of methods using animal movement and plant genetic data on two primate‐dispersed Neotropical plant species

“…Mise, Yamazaki, Soga, and Koike (2016) compared SDD estimates for racoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides) using the bait-marker method against the combination of movement data and gut passage, and found comparable results when data were collected from the same region. Such phenological changes may become increasingly frequent as a consequence of global climate change (Abernethy, Bush, Forget, Mendoza, & Morellato, 2018;Cleland, Chuine, Menzel, Mooney, & Schwartz, 2007). In the same study area, spatially explicit individual-based modeling of SDD in P. panurensis based on behaviour patterns of the same dispersers provided concordant results (Bialozyt, Flinkerbusch, Niggemann, & Heymann, 2014).…”

Tropical phenology: Recent advances and perspectives

“…Recent advances in analytical methods have started to overcome challenges of describing diverse phenological patterns, as well as associations between phenological events and environmental variables (Abernethy, Bush, Forget, Mendoza, & Morellato, ). The most straightforward way to deal with the phenological diversity is to categorize patterns based on frequencies and other criteria (e.g., Gentry, ; Newstrom, Frankie, & Baker, ).…”