Spring and autumn phenology of Bulgarian and German provenances of Common beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) under similar climatic conditions

Abstract

The ongoing climate change creates serious concerns about how tree species will behave under new environmental condi­tions. Common beech (Fagus sylvatica L.), a main and important tree species in Europe, will also be affected by the coming changes. One possibility to test the adaptability of this tree species is to perform provenance tests, transplanting trees from northern areas to warmer and drier places, and to investigate their behavior over a long period of time (transfer experiments). This work describes such an experiment. A provenance test was established in April 2010 with two-year-old seedlings from 8 provenances of beech - 5 from Germany (Bavaria) and 3 from Bulgaria. Our purposes were to determine differences in the manifestation of the spring and autumn phenophases from beech of German and Bulgarian provenances and to seek a relationship between geographical coordinates and altitude of the same provenances and timing of leaf flushing and leaf coloring/shedding. In this experiment we examined leaf unfolding and leaf coloring/shedding in two growing periods (2013 and 2016). We found that the Bulgarian provenances flushed earlier in comparison with the German ones in both growing periods. No statistically significant clustering of the Bulgarian and German provenances during leaf coloring/shedding for the second period of observation was found. Longitude had the most important influence on flushing. A linear relationship between the mean date of leaf coloring and the longitude and latitude was determined, but only for the first growing period (2013), when eastern provenances had later leaf coloring, while more northern provenances had earlier leaf coloring.

Greater capacity to exploit warming temperatures in northern populations of European beech is partly driven by delayed leaf senescence

“…The origin of beech populations is a major determinant of the timing of their leaf spring and leaf autumn phenology (Table 1), which confirms their genetic differentiation in the control of phenology (Chmura and Rozkowski 2002; Petkova et al 2017, Alberto et al 2013). This differentiation is often stronger for spring phenology than for autumn phenology (Vitasse et al 2009; Weih 2009; Firmat et al 2017; Petkova et al 2017), which is in agreement with what we found in our beech provenances (Fig. 3a & b).…”

“…Although the dates of spring and autumn leaf phenological stages varied between the two years of our study, the same response-patterns persisted in both years (Figs. 3 and S1), suggesting a consistent effect of environmental conditions on the trials (Weih 2009; Friedman et al 2011; Petkova et al 2017). Our results also revealed larger differences among populations for both BB and LS in the Slovakian trial than in the German one (Fig.…”

“…The duration of autumn leaf senescence is longer than that of leaf flushing in beech (Fig. 3, Table S2, S3) (Gömöry and Paule 2011; Petkova et al 2017), whereas other temperate broadleaf species such as Salix spp . and Quercus petraea have a relatively long period of leaf-out and relatively abrupt autumn leaf senescence (Weih 2009; Firmat et al 2017).…”

Adaptive diversity of beech seedlings under climate change scenarios

“…These trends include clines in bud burst defined by longitude, latitude and altitude in European beech provenances (e.g. Nørgård Nielsen et al, 2003;Robson et al, 2011;Gömöry and Paule 2011;Schüler et al, 2012;Petkova et al, 2017), with the southeastern ones demonstrating earlier bud burst (Ivankovic et al, 2011;Ballian et al, 2015). Provenance tests all over the continent describe a general trend of populations growing in warmer and less continental climates to have an earlier bud burst than populations from colder climates (Robson et al, 2011).…”

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“…Several provenance tests exist in Europe for beech, under field or glasshouse conditions (e.g. von Wühlisch et al, 1995;Nielsen and Jørgensen 2003;Czajkowski and Bolte, 2006;Gömöry and Paule 2011;Liesebach 2012;Schüler et al, 2012;Kreyling et al, 2012, Thiel et al, 2014Harter et al, 2015;Dounavi et al, 2016;Petkova et al, 2017), providing important information for forest management and conservation of beech populations.…”