Warming reduced flowering synchrony and extended community flowering season in an alpine meadow on the Tibetan Plateau

Predicting community traits along an alpine grassland transect using field imaging spectroscopy

Assessing plant community traits is important for understanding how terrestrial ecosystems respond and adapt to global climate change. Field hyperspectral remote sensing is effective for quantitatively estimating vegetation properties in most terrestrial ecosystems, although it remains to be tested in areas with dwarf and sparse vegetation, such as the Tibetan Plateau. We measured canopy reflectance in the Tibetan Plateau using a handheld imaging spectrometer and conducted plant community investigations along an alpine grassland transect. We estimated community structural and functional traits, as well as community function based on a field survey and laboratory analysis using 14 spectral vegetation indices (VIs) derived from hyperspectral images. We quantified the contributions of environmental drivers, VIs, and community traits to community function by structural equation modelling (SEM). Univariate linear regression analysis showed that plant community traits are best predicted by the normalized difference vegetation index, enhanced vegetation index, and simple ratio. Structural equation modelling showed that VIs and community traits positively affected community function, whereas environmental drivers and specific leaf area had the opposite effect. Additionally, VIs integrated with environmental drivers were indirectly linked to community function by characterizing the variations in community structural and functional traits. This study demonstrates that community-level spectral reflectance will help scale plant trait information measured at the leaf level to larger-scale ecological processes. Field imaging spectroscopy represents a promising tool to predict the responses of alpine grassland communities to climate change.

Warming reduced flowering synchrony and extended community flowering season in an alpine meadow on the Tibetan Plateau

The timing of phenological events is highly sensitive to climate change, and may influence ecosystem structure and function. Although changes in flowering phenology among species under climate change have been reported widely, how species-specific shifts will affect phenological synchrony and community-level phenology patterns remains unclear. We conducted a manipulative experiment of warming and precipitation addition and reduction to explore how climate change affected flowering phenology at the species and community levels in an alpine meadow on the eastern Tibetan Plateau. We found that warming advanced the first and last flowering times differently and with no consistent shifts in flowering duration among species, resulting in the entire flowering period of species emerging earlier in the growing season. Early-flowering species were more sensitive to warming than mid- and late-flowering species, thereby reducing flowering synchrony among species and extending the community-level flowering season. However, precipitation and its interactions with warming had no significant effects on flowering phenology. Our results suggest that temperature regulates flowering phenology from the species to community levels in this alpine meadow community, yet how species shifted their flowering timing and duration in response to warming varied. This species-level divergence may reshape flowering phenology in this alpine plant community. Decreasing flowering synchrony among species and the extension of community-level flowering seasons under warming may alter future trophic interactions, with cascading consequences to community and ecosystem function.