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Climate warming disrupts mast seeding and its fitness benefits in European beech

Nature Plants volume 6, pages 88–94 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Many plants benefit from synchronous year-to-year variation in seed production, called masting. Masting benefits plants because it increases the efficiency of pollination and satiates predators, which reduces seed loss. Here, using a 39-year-long dataset, we show that climate warming over recent decades has increased seed production of European beech but decreased the year-to-year variability of seed production and the reproductive synchrony among individuals. Consequently, the benefit that the plants gained from masting has declined. While climate warming was associated with increased reproductive effort, we demonstrate that less effective pollination and greater losses of seeds to predators offset any benefits to the plants. This shows that an apparently simple benefit of climate warming unravels because of complex ecological interactions. Our results indicate that in masting systems, the main beneficiaries of climate-driven increases in seed production are seed predators, not plants.

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Fig. 1: Temporal trends in European beech (F. sylvatica) seed production in England: population- and individual-level variability, and within- and among-site synchrony of reproduction for 12 sites and 139 trees (1980–2018).
Fig. 2: Temporal contribution of the predictor variables.
Fig. 3: Weakening benefits to European beech from mast seeding.
Fig. 4: Temporal trends in European beech total and effective seed production.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

The study was partially funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council grant no. NE/S007857/1. M.B. was supported by the Polish National Science Centre (grants Sonatina no. 2017/24/C/NZ8/00151 and Uwertura no. 2018/28/U/NZ8/00003). We thank M. Fernández-Martínez for statistical consultation and R. Chiverrell, A. Morse and L. McGarty for comments on the manuscript. The late J.R. Packham and G.M. Hilton are acknowledged for initiating the English Beech Masting Survey, as are friends, family and colleagues who have assisted in annual data collection. We acknowledge the E-OBS dataset from the EU-FP6 project UERRA (http://www.uerra.eu) and the data providers in the ECA&D project (https://www.ecad.eu). We thank U. Dragosits and S. Tomlinson (NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology) for providing nitrogen deposition data and advice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systematic Zoology, Faculty of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland

    Michał Bogdziewicz

  2. Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Dave Kelly

  3. School of Life Sciences, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK

    Peter A. Thomas

  4. Department of Natural Sciences, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

    Jonathan G. A. Lageard

  5. Department of Geography and Planning, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Andrew Hacket-Pain

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  1. Michał Bogdziewicz
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  2. Dave Kelly
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Contributions

M.B. conceived the study and drafted the manuscript. M.B. led the analysis with input from A.H.P. and D.K. P.A.T., J.G.A.L. and A.H.-P. collected and managed the data. All authors interpreted the results, revised the text and provided critical feedback, and helped shape the final text.

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Correspondence to Michał Bogdziewicz.

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Peer review information Nature Plants thanks Eliane Schermer and the other, anonymous, reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Bogdziewicz, M., Kelly, D., Thomas, P.A. et al. Climate warming disrupts mast seeding and its fitness benefits in European beech. Nat. Plants 6, 88–94 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-0592-8

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