Cascading effects of climate change: new advances in drivers and shifts of tropical reproductive phenology

Abstract

Tropical forests were long viewed as relatively stable systems, with little biologically important variation in climate. However, in recent years, accumulating evidence has suggested that tropical forests vary widely both in climate and phenology, that climate and phenology are inextricably linked, and that tropical forests increasingly display the effects of climate change. It is critically important to understand these climate-phenology interactions to be able to predict the cascading impacts on resource availability that will affect wildlife. There are many important and unanswered questions regarding how the mechanistic drivers and proximate cues of tropical forest reproductive phenology will vary in response to environmental change. Addressing these questions remains a huge challenge due to a paucity of long-term comparable data that hampers our ability to connect observed phenology patterns with fundamental theory. In this review, we highlight ten focal papers that have advanced our ability to identify phenological patterns, improved our understanding of the drivers of flowering and fruiting, and have innovatively linked fruiting patterns with impacts on wildlife diet, reproduction, and survival. We end with a call for increased collaboration among forest and wildlife ecologists, theoretical ecologists, meteorologists, and decision-makers to advance and apply phenological research in the tropics and reduce the negative impact of climate change on vital ecological functions, and services, of tropical forest ecosystems.