Abstract
Compared with extensive studies on leaf phenology, the effects of climate warming on reproductive phenology, particularly fruiting, in natural woody species remain less well understood. Here we use a national-scale phenological dataset of 2735 in situ observations of flowering and fruiting from 102 woody species across 31 sites in China during 1980–2008 to quantify warming effects on flowering, fruiting and reproductive season length (duration between flowering and fruiting). We found that warming generally advanced flowering and fruiting, but at different rates among species, leading to divergent changes in reproductive season length. Temperature and accumulated forcing during reproductive season were the primary climatic factors: higher temperature was associated with shorter reproductive season through accelerated reproductive development, whereas greater accumulated forcing was associated with longer reproductive season, indicating increased time requirements for fruit maturation under warmer conditions. These findings indicate that woody species exhibit heterogeneous reproductive phenological responses to climate warming.
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Data availability
Processed datasets derived from the original data sources and used for statistical analyses and figure generation in this study are archived on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18522837.
Code availability
All R scripts used to perform the statistical analyses and generate the figures in this study are available: https://github.com/JiGuannan/Warming_Reproductive_Phenology_Data_Code.
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Acknowledgements
This project was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFE0105100-1), National Natural Science Foundation of China (32371676), Science and Technology Projects in Guangzhou (2025A04J4381) and Guangdong Science and Technology Plan Project (2023B1212060046). The authors acknowledge all members of National Earth System Science Data Sharing Infrastructure, National Science & Technology Infrastructure of China (http://www.geodata.cn) for collecting and providing the phenological data. The authors also acknowledge the climate dataset from the National Meteorological Information Center of China (http://data.cma.cn).
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Qianqian Ma designed this study. Guannan Ji performed the analysis and wrote the manuscript with assistance from Qianqian Ma, Frank Berninger, Yalan Peng, Xiaobo Li, Huoxing Zhu, Shaokang Zhang, Meng Lv and Zhuolin Yang. All authors discussed and commented on the manuscript.
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Ji, G., Peng, Y., Li, X. et al. Climate warming advances flowering and fruiting but drives divergent changes in reproductive season length. Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03374-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03374-6
