Warming acts through earlier snowmelt to advance but not extend alpine community flowering ...

Large-scale warming will alter multiple local climate factors in alpine tundra, yet very few experimental studies examine the combined yet distinct influences of earlier snowmelt, higher temperatures and altered soil moisture on alpine ecosystems. This limits our ability to predict responses to clim...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jabis, Meredith, Winkler, Daniel, Kueppers, Lara
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: Dryad 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmgtd
https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmgtd
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Summary:Large-scale warming will alter multiple local climate factors in alpine tundra, yet very few experimental studies examine the combined yet distinct influences of earlier snowmelt, higher temperatures and altered soil moisture on alpine ecosystems. This limits our ability to predict responses to climate change by plant species and communities. To address this gap, we used infrared heaters and manual watering in a fully factorial experiment to determine the relative importance of these climate factors on plant flowering phenology, and response differences among plant functional groups. Heating advanced snowmelt and flower initiation, but exposed plants to colder early-spring conditions in the period prior to first flower, indicating that snowmelt timing, not temperature, advances flowering initiation in the alpine community. Flowering duration was largely conserved; heating did not extend average species flowering into the latter part of the growing season but instead flowering was completed earlier in heated ... : This dataset was collected during field surveys from 2009-2013 at the Alpine Treeline Warming experiment on Niwot Ridge at the Mountian Research Station, CO. ...