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National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

Project Description

Reproduction is a key component of plant life-cycles and is crucial for dispersal, however it has a surprisingly poorly understood relationship to environmental drivers. This is particularly true for plant species with highly variable reproduction over time, known as 'mast seeding'. While mast-seeding patterns have been linked to weather (temperature, precipitation), describing past patterns and predicting future reproduction of plant populations is particularly challenging because of high temporal variability. Using data across Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites, and bringing together experts in mast-seeding, forest ecology, population dynamics, synthesis, and statistical and mathematical modeling, our objectives are to i) assess how generalizable temporal patterns of mast seeding are across species and disparate locations, ii) test how environmental drivers and past performance influence mast seeding along a continuum from non-masting (i.e., low temporal variability) to strongly masting (i.e., high temporal variability) species, and iii) compare statistical approaches for finding environmental drivers for plant reproduction. Products from this working group include: an R-workflow for calculating mast seeding metrics, incorporation of LTER plant reproduction data into i) an existing R-package for LTER population-level synthesis (Popler) and ii) global mast-seeding databases, multiple publications, and a workshop on spatio-temporal patterns and environmental drivers of plant reproduction.

Principal Investigator(s)

Jalene LaMontagne, Elizabeth E. Crone, Miranda Redmond

Project Dates

Start: February 1, 2021

End: December 31, 2023

active

Participants

Jessica Barton
DePaul University
David M Bell
USDA Forest Service
Bala Chaudhary
Dartmouth College
Angel Chen
University of California, Santa Barbara
Natalie Cleavitt
Cornell University
Elizabeth E. Crone
Tufts University
David Greene
Humboldt State University
Penelope Holland
University of York
Inés Ibañez
University of Michigan
Jill Johnstone
University of Saskatchewan
Walt Koenig
Cornell University
Jalene LaMontagne
DePaul University
Nicholas J. Lyon
University of California, Santa Barbara
Diana Macias
University of New Mexico
Thomas E.X. Miller
Rice University
Katherine Nigro
Colorado State University
Ian Pearse
Fort Collins Science Center, USGS
Miranda Redmond
Colorado State University
Akiko Satake
Kyushu University
Akiko Satake
Princeton University
Mark Schulze
Oregon State University
Rebecca S. Snell
Ohio University
Jess K. Zimmerman
University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus

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