Chinese scientists uncover climate warming impact on plateau flowering

LANZHOU -- Chinese scientists have newly revealed that climate warming reshapes plant seasonal flowering but stabilizes species interactions in a grassland on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, according to Lanzhou University in Northwest China's Gansu province.

Findings of this study help deepen the understanding of species-specific phenological responses to global warming in alpine grasslands, as well as their ecological impact, the university said.

The study was conducted by researchers from Lanzhou University, the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and East China Normal University. The study's findings have been published online in the journal New Phytologist.

Flowering is a key process in sexual reproduction of plants. Changes in flowering phenology have an impact on the success of plant reproduction, and may also profoundly affect maintenance of biodiversity and the stability of ecosystems, said Wang Hao, a professor in the College of Ecology at Lanzhou University.

A large number of control experiments and long-term observations have shown that climate warming commonly drives asymmetric shifts in flowering phenology among species -- potentially disrupting plant-plant interactions and threatening ecosystem stability.

Researchers in the joint study team explored mechanisms driving species-specific phenological responses and the ecological consequences.

They carried out sustained observations of the seasonal flowering patterns of 29 plant species from 2021 to 2023 -- based on a manipulative warming experiment in alpine grasslands in Haibei Tibetan autonomous prefecture in Northwest China's Qinghai province.

Researchers evaluated the impact of climate warming on potential interactions by using the overlap of flowering times of different species.

Warming advanced the start of the flowering season in about 70 percent of species, with greater phenological shifts in late-flowering species compared with early-flowering species and in insect-pollinated species compared with wind-pollinated flowers, while shifts were more similar in closely related species compared with distantly related species, the study results revealed.

Notably, this new study indicates that future climate warming will significantly reshape flowering phenology. However, interspecies interactions may remain stable, Wang said, as warming significantly altered the interaction potential in only 6.8 percent of pairs of species.

"The study indicates that warming may induce substantial phenological reassembly without necessarily disrupting plant-plant interactions, suggesting the resilience of ecological networks to phenological change," Wang added.