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. 2025 Sep 2.
doi: 10.1111/nph.70537. Online ahead of print.

Climate warming reshapes seasonal flowering but stabilizes species interactions in a Tibetan alpine grassland

Juanjuan Zhang  1 , Jianbin Wang  2 , Jiumei Ma  1 , Chunyan Lu  3 , Shijie Ning  2 , Huimin Zhou  1 , Lijuan Sun  2 , Chao Song  1 , Xin Jing  2 , Zhenhua Zhang  4 , Huiying Liu  3 , Jin-Sheng He  2   5 , Hao Wang  1
Affiliations

Climate warming reshapes seasonal flowering but stabilizes species interactions in a Tibetan alpine grassland

Juanjuan Zhang et al. New Phytol. .

Abstract

Climate warming commonly drives asymmetric shifts in flowering phenology among species, potentially disrupting plant-plant interactions and threatening ecosystem stability. However, the mechanisms driving these species-specific phenological responses, and the extent to which resulting asynchrony destabilizes interspecific interactions, remain poorly understood. Using a 3-yr in situ warming experiment in a Tibetan alpine grassland, we monitored seasonal flowering patterns of 29 species and quantified interaction potentials across 812 species pairs from their flowering-time overlap. Warming advanced the start of the flowering season in 75.9% of species and the end of the flowering season in 69.0%, with greater phenological shifts in late- than early-flowering species, in insect- than wind-pollinated species, and with more similar shifts in closely related species than in distantly related species. By contrast, warming significantly altered the interaction potential in only 6.8% of species pairs (55/812), independent of the pairwise phylogenetic distance. Our results advance understanding of species-specific phenological shifts in alpine grasslands and reveal that warming may induce substantial phenological reassembly without necessarily disrupting plant-plant interactions, suggesting resilience of ecological networks to phenological change.

Keywords: Tibetan Plateau; alpine meadow; climate change; flowering phenology; interspecific interactions; phylogenetic relatedness.

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