LTER: Identifying environmental drivers of plant reproduction across LTER sites

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.