Seminar: Michael Rzanny

The timing of phenological events plays a crucial role in ecosystem processes. Ongoing global warming strongly affects plant species` phenologies and monitoring those changes on different scales is essential to understand their consequences. Opportunistic plant observations collected e.g. via species reporting platforms or identification apps provide a growing source of spatiotemporal plant observation data.

In my talks I will present how such data can be used to monitor changes in species phenologies and they are suitable to derive large-scale relationships such as “Hopkins’ bioclimatic law” which quantifies the phenological delay with increasing latitude, longitude and elevation.

We observed two subsequent years and found significant shifts in the timing of mean flowering date from for almost all of the observed 20 wild flowering, herbaceous species.

Moreover, depending on the species, we observe an elevational shift between -5 and 50 days per 1000m and a latitudinal shift between -1 and 4 days per degree northwards.

Our results indicate that the growing amount of opportunistic plant observation data provides reliable phenological information. In combination with data collected within traditional phenological observation networks, opportunistic data can be used to parameterize climate- and vegetation models and are expected to allow for more timely and fine-grained predictions.

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