In a recent study featured in a Special Issue of Annals of Botany Plant Reproduction in a Changing Global Environment, Zeng et al found that plants requiring long days to flower are not changing their flowering time with respect to the season as quickly as plants that rely on short-days or are day-neutral. The analysis covered 67 years of data on 767 species, for a wide assessment of ‘first flowering day’ over time.
Zheng et al found that “plants requiring short days to flower were, on average, able to keep up with plants without photoperiod requirements, but plants that require long days to flower were, on average, not changing substantially over time”.
This means that long-day plants might miss out on the start of longer growing seasons or become temporally separated from their pollinators, risking survival.
Many plants use daylength to determine the correct time to flower. This helps avoid the mistake of flowering after a single warm day or to flower when frost might occur. But if the plants rely too heavily on daylength to initiate flowering, then they may fail to adapt their flowering-time to warmer climates.
Therefore, Zheng et al assert that “identifying the factors that contribute to how plant taxa change their phenology is thus crucial for conservation efforts and for predicting the likely composition of future ecosystems.”
The authors suspect that day-neutral and short-day plants experience strong temperature cues that are leading to advances in their flowering time.
READ THE ARTICLE
Zeng, K., Sentinella, A.T., Armitage, C. and Moles, A.T., 2024. Species that require long-day conditions to flower are not advancing their flowering phenology as fast as species without photoperiod requirements. Annals of Botany, XX, pp.1-11. https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcae121
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