A challenge in phenology studies is understanding what constitutes phenological change amidst background variation. The majority of phenological studies have focussed on extracting critical points in the seasonal growth cycle, without exploiting the full temporal detail. The high degree of phenological variability between years demonstrates the necessity of distinguishing long term phenological...

Species respond to climate change in two dominant ways: range shifts in latitude or elevation and phenological shifts of life-history events. Range shifts are widely viewed as the principal mechanism for thermal niche tracking, and phenological shifts in birds and other consumers are widely understood as the principal mechanism for tracking temporal peaks in biotic resources. However, phenologi...

Questions: We asked several linked questions about phenology and precipitation relationships at local, landscape, and regional spatial scales within individual seasons, between seasons, and between year temporal scales. (1) How do winter and summer phenological patterns vary in response to total seasonal rainfall? (2) How are phenological rates affected by the previous season rainfall? (3) How ...

Phenology is a key aspect of plant success. Recent research has demonstrated that herbarium specimens can provide important information on plant phenology. Massive digitization efforts have the potential to greatly expand herbarium-based phenological research, but also pose a serious challenge regarding efficient data collection. Here, we introduce CrowdCurio, a crowdsourcing tool for the colle...

Phenology offers critical insights into the responses of species to climate change; shifts in species' phenologies can result in disruptions to the ecosystem processes and services upon which human livelihood depends. To better detect such shifts, scientists need long-term phenological records covering many taxa and across a broad geographic distribution. To date, phenological observation effor...

Concern regarding the biological effects of climate change has led to a recent surge in research to understand the consequences of phenological change for species interactions. This rapidly expanding research program is centered on three lines of inquiry: (1) how the phenological overlap of interacting species is changing, (2) why the phenological overlap of interacting species is changing, and...

For many species in seasonal environments, warmer springs associated with anthropogenic climate change are causing phenological changes. Within ecological communities, the timing of interactions among species may be altered if the species experience asymmetrical phenological shifts. We present a model that examines the consequences of changes in the relative timing of herbivory and pollination ...

We developed and evaluated a new approach for mapping rubber plantations and natural forests in one of Southeast Asia’s biodiversity hot spots, Xishuangbanna in China. We used a one-year annual time series of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) and short-wave infrared (SWIR) reflectance data to develop phenological metrics. These phenological m...