Predicting habitat quality is a major challenge for animals selecting a breeding patch, because it affects reproductive success. Breeding site selection may be based on previous experience, or on social information from the density and success of competitors with an earlier phenology. Variation in animal breeding phenology is often correlated with variation in habitat quality. Generally, animal...

Vegetation phenology is considered a sensitive indicator of climate change, which controls carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles within terrestrial ecosystems. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is an important moderate resolution remote sensing data for monitoring vegetation phenology. However, Terra MODIS Collection 5 (C5) vege...

Annual gross primary productivity (GPP) varies considerably due to climate-induced changes in plant phenology and physiology. However, the relative importance of plant phenology and physiology on annual GPP variation is not clear. In this study, a Statistical Model of Integrated Phenology and Physiology (SMIPP) was used to evaluate the relative contributions of maximum daily GPP (GPPmax) and th...

Flowering phenology is an important determinant of a plant's reproductive success. Both assortative mating and niche construction can result in the evolution of correlations between phenology and other reproductive, functional, and life history traits. Correlations between phenology and herbivore defence traits are particularly likely because the timing of flowering can allow a plant to escape ...

Ebola virus disease outbreaks in mammals (including humans and great apes) start with sporadic host switches from unknown reservoir species. The factors leading to such spillover events are not clearly understood. Filoviridae have a wide range of natural hosts and are unstable once outside hosts. Spillover events, which involve the physical transfer of viral particles across species, could ther...

Assessment of crop nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) is important in agricultural research. Various approaches exist to analyze NUE. A recently proposed NUE concept is further developed and a calculation tool for practical use presented. A critical component in the NUE concept is the plants’ mean nitrogen (N) content during the main growth period (N’). The N’ is delimited by the critical crop pheno...

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is an important crop in the fresh produce and food-processing industry, with one of the highest production yields for edible crops in the world. Due to the variation in consumer palatability and preference, tomato cultivars are diverse in terms of shape, color, taste and functional materials compared to major cereal crops. Accordingly, rapid and efficient breedi...

Flowering phenology and synchrony with biotic and abiotic resources are crucial traits determining the reproductive success in insect-pollinated plants. In seasonal climates, plants flowering for long periods should assure reproductive success when resources are more predictable. In this work, we evaluated the relationship between flowering phenology and synchrony and reproductive success in Hy...

In recent years, research in invasion biology has focused increasing attention on understanding the role of phenology in shaping plant invasions. Multiple studies have found non-native species that tend to flower distinctly early or late in the growing season, advance more with warming or have shifted earlier with climate change compared with native species. This growing body of literature has ...

Drought is a significant climatic disturbance in grasslands, yet the impact drought caused by global warming has on grassland phenology is still unclear. Our research investigates the long-term variability of grassland phenology in relation to drought in the Canadian prairies from 1982 to 2014. Based on the start of growing season (SOG) and the end of growing season (EOG) derived from Global In...