Community‐wide changes in intertaxonomic temporal co‐occurrence resulting from phenological shifts |
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| Authors: | Xingli Giam Tien Ming Lee Hao Luo Jia Wu Qiaoyi Liang Jian Zhao Xiaoyan Long Hong Pang Biao Wang Wei Liang Zhengwang Zhang Xuejie Gao Jiang Zhu |
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| Affiliation: | 1. School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;2. Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA;3. Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;5. Laboratory of Climate Studies, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, China;6. State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol, College of Ecology and Evolution, School of Life Sciences, Sun Yat‐sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China;7. Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Tropical Animal and Plant Ecology, College of Life Sciences, Hainan Normal University, Haikou, Hainan, China;8. Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering, College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China |
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| Abstract: | Global climate change is known to affect the assembly of ecological communities by altering species' spatial distribution patterns, but little is known about how climate change may affect community assembly by changing species' temporal co‐occurrence patterns, which is highly likely given the widely observed phenological shifts associated with climate change. Here, we analyzed a 29‐year phenological data set comprising community‐level information on the timing and span of temporal occurrence in 11 seasonally occurring animal taxon groups from 329 local meteorological observatories across China. We show that widespread shifts in phenology have resulted in community‐wide changes in the temporal overlap between taxa that are dominated by extensions, and that these changes are largely due to taxa's altered span of temporal occurrence rather than the degree of synchrony in phenological shifts. Importantly, our findings also suggest that climate change may have led to less phenological mismatch than generally presumed, and that the context under which to discuss the ecological consequences of phenological shifts should be expanded beyond asynchronous shifts. |
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| Keywords: | China climate change community assembly interspecific temporal overlap phenological shift temporal occurrence window |
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