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Edited by Thomas J. Givnish, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Robert E. Dickinson March 30, 2020 (received for review November 29, 2019)
Significance
Frost in late spring causes severe ecosystem damage in temperate and boreal regions. We here analyze late-spring frost occurrences between 1959 and 2017 and woody species’ resistance strategies to forecast forest vulnerability under climate change. Leaf-out phenology and leaf-freezing resistance data come from up to 1,500 species cultivated in common gardens. The greatest increase in leaf-damaging spring frost has occurred in Europe and East Asia, where species are more vulnerable to spring frost than in North America. The data imply that 35 and 26% of Europe’s and Asia’s forests are increasingly threatened by frost damage, while this is only true for 10% of North America. Phenological strategies that helped trees tolerate past frost frequencies will thus be increasingly mismatched to future conditions
Abstract
Late-spring frosts (LSFs) affect the performance of plants and animals across the world’s temperate and boreal zones, but despite their ecological and economic impact on agriculture and forestry, the geographic distribution and evolutionary impact of these frost events are poorly understood. Here, we analyze LSFs between 1959 and 2017 and the resistance strategies of Northern Hemisphere woody species to infer trees’ adaptations for minimizing frost damage to their leaves and to forecast forest vulnerability under the ongoing changes in frost frequencies. Trait values on leaf-out and leaf-freezing resistance come from up to 1,500 temperate and boreal woody species cultivated in common gardens. We find that areas in which LSFs are common, such as eastern North America, harbor tree species with cautious (late-leafing) leaf-out strategies. Areas in which LSFs used to be unlikely, such as broad-leaved forests and shrublands in Europe and Asia, instead harbor opportunistic tree species (quickly reacting to warming air temperatures). LSFs in the latter regions are currently increasing, and given species’ innate resistance strategies, we estimate that ∼35% of the European and ∼26% of the Asian temperate forest area, but only ∼10% of the North American, will experience increasing late-frost damage in the future. Our findings reveal region-specific changes in the spring-frost risk that can inform decision-making in land management, forestry, agriculture, and insurance policy.
Footnotes
↵1C.M.Z. and L.M. contributed equally to this work.
- ↵2To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: constantin.zohner{at}t-online.de.
Author contributions: C.M.Z. conceived and developed the study with input from S.S.R. and J.-C.S.; C.M.Z. and L.M. performed research; L.M., B.M.B., and A.O. computed the frost risk maps; C.M.Z. and V.S. collected the phenology and leaf freezing resistance data; C.M.Z. wrote the manuscript with assistance from S.S.R. and T.W.C.; Y.V., B.M.B., A.O., F.B., J.-F.B., V.S., P.B.R., and J.L. provided input on the manuscript text; P.B.R., G.-J.N., S.d.-M., G.A., C.A.-F., R.B., U.-B.B., H.Y.H.C., C.C., E.C., S.D., T.M.F., L.F., D.G., A.M.J., B.J., T.J., S.K.-R., M.L.K., H.S.K., H.K., V.K.J., D.L., M.L., T.Z.-N., P.A.N., A.P., H.P., P. Saikia, P. Schall, V.Š., M.S., E.T., H.V., C.Z., and X.Z. contributed forest inventory data; and all authors reviewed the manuscript.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. T.J.G. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
Data deposition: All source code, models, and raw data have been deposited in GitHub (https://github.com/LidongMo/FrostRiskProject) and Datasets S1–S3.
This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1920816117/-/DCSupplemental.
Published under the PNAS license.
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Late-spring frost risk between 1959 and 2017 decreased in North America but increased in Europe and Asia
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