Inter-annual and decadal changes in teleconnections drive continental-scale synchronization of tree reproduction

Altmetric: 76Citations: 1More detail Article | OPEN Inter-annual and decadal changes in teleconnections drive continental-scale synchronization of tree reproduction Davide Ascoli, Giorgio Vacchiano, Marco Turco, Marco Conedera, Igor Drobyshev, Janet Maringer, Renzo Motta & Andrew Hacket-Pain Nature Communicationsvolume 8, Article number: 2205 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41467-017-02348-9 Download Citation Atmospheric dynamicsEvolutionary ecologyForest ecologyPhenology Received: 11 May 2017 Accepted: 22 November 2017 Published online: 20 December 2017 Abstract Climate teleconnections drive highly variable and synchronous seed production (masting) over large scales. Disentangling the effect of high-frequency (inter-annual variation) from low-frequency (decadal trends) components of climate oscillations will improve our understanding of masting as an ecosystem process. Using century-long observations on masting (the MASTREE database) and data on the Northern Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), we show that in the last 60 years both high-frequency summer and spring NAO, and low-frequency winter NAO components are highly correlated to continent-wide masting in European beech and Norway spruce. Relationships are weaker (non-stationary) in the early twentieth century. This finding improves our understanding on how climate variation affects large-scale synchronization of tree masting. Moreover, it supports the connection between proximate and ultimate causes of masting: indeed, large-scale features of atmospheric circulation coherently drive cues and resources for masting, as well as its evolutionary drivers, such as pollination efficiency, abundance of seed dispersers, and natural disturbance regimes.