Vegetation phenology regulates many ecosystem processes and is an indicator of the biological responses to climate change. It is important to model the timing of leaf senescence accurately, since the canopy duration and carbon assimilation are strongly determined by the timings of leaf senescence. However, the existing phenology models are unlikely to accurately predict the end of the growing s...

Atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD) is a key component of drought and has a strong influence on yields. Whole-plant transpiration rate (TR) response to increasing VPD has been linked to drought tolerance in wheat, but because of its challenging phenotyping, its genetic basis remains unexplored. Further, the genetic control of other key traits linked to daytime TR such as leaf area, stomata...

As a consequence of warming temperatures around the world, spring and autumn phenologies have been shifting, with corresponding changes in the length of the growing season. Our understanding of the spatial and interspecific variation of these changes, however, is limited. Not all species are responding similarly, and there is significant spatial variation in responses even within species. This ...

Plant phenology is a sensitive indicator of the effects of global change on terrestrial ecosystems and controls the timing of key ecosystem functions including photosynthesis and transpiration. Aerial drone imagery and photogrammetric techniques promise to advance the study of phenology by enabling the creation of distortion-free orthomosaics of plant canopies at the landscape scale, but with b...

It has been predicted that environmental changes will radically alter the selective pressures on phenological traits. Long-lived species, such as trees, will be particularly affected, as they may need to undergo major adaptive change over only one or a few generations. The traits describing the annual life cycle of trees are generally highly evolvable, but nothing is known about the strength of...

We integrated recent research on cardinal temperatures for phenology and early leaf growth, spikelet formation, early morning flowering, transpirational cooling, and heat- and cold-induced sterility into an existing to crop growth model ORYZA2000. We compared for an arid environment observed potential yields with yields simulated with default ORYZA2000, with modified subversions of ORYZA2000 an...

Regional phenology is important in ecosystem simulation models and coupled biosphere/atmosphere models. In the continental United States, the timing of the onset of greenness in the spring (leaf expansion, grass green-up) and offset of greenness in the fall (leaf abscission, cessation of height growth, grass brown-oft) are strongly influenced by meteorological and climatological conditions. We ...

a r t i c l e i n f o Green leaf phenology is known to be sensitive to climate variation. Phenology is also important because it exerts significant control on terrestrial carbon cycling and sequestration. High-quality measurements of green leaf phenology are therefore increasingly important for understanding the effects of climate change on ecosystem function and biosphere–atmosphere interactio...

To explore the roles of plasticity and genetic variation in the response to spatial and temporal climate variation, we established a common garden consisting of paired collections of native and introduced riparian trees sampled along a latitudinal gradient. The garden in Fort Collins, Colorado (latitude 40.6°N), included 681 native plains cottonwood (Populus deltoides subsp. monilifera) and int...