Geology topics

Jessie Foest

Publications and source records attributed to Jessie Foest.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2025

Weather drivers of reproductive variability in perennial plants and their implications for climate change risks

Seed production in perennial plants often shows strong year-to-year variation, a phenomenon known as masting. Masting is typically adaptive and driven by weather cues that synchronize reproduction by promoting or suppressing flowering and seed set. These cues, involving temperature, precipitation, and drought, differ across species and regions, yet a global synthesis is needed. Understanding such patterns is crucial, as reproductive responses to climate interact with resource constraints to shape plant fitness under climate change. Here, we analyze climate-reproduction relationships in 746 populations of 331 species worldwide using moving-window methods. We find that temperature is the dominant cue for reproductive investment, though its influence is weaker in the wettest and driest climates. In temperate and boreal regions, reproduction is most often linked to warmer conditions, whereas in the tropics, reproduction is disproportionately linked to cooler temperatures. Therefore, we expect rising temperatures to increase reproductive failures in the tropics, but to reduce interannual variability in temperate and boreal zones as favorable cues become more frequent. These results confirm long-standing theoretical predictions and provide a global framework for evaluating climate change risks to mast seeding.

Nature Communications↗

USGS2025

Intraspecific variation in masting across climate gradients is inconsistent with the environmental stress hypothesis

Year-to-year variation in seed crop size (i.e., masting) varies strongly among populations of the same species. Understanding what causes this variation is vital, as masting affects the ability of tree species to regenerate and determines the population dynamics of a wide variety of animals. It is commonly thought that environmental stress is a key driver of masting variability. The environmental stress hypothesis posits that more marginal conditions increase the strength of masting. Using 437 time series from 19 tree species, we find that this hypothesis fails to fully explain how masting varies across marginality gradients. We expected higher interannual variation and less frequent masting events at species margins but instead found that while mast years are indeed less frequent, the interannual variation was lower toward the margins. The observed patterns suggest that populations growing at the margins may invest more resources in low seed production years compared with their conspecifics, hedging their bets in these more challenging environments.

Ecology↗

USGS2024

Evolutionary ecology of masting: Mechanisms, models, and climate change

Many perennial plants show mast seeding, characterized by synchronous and highly variable reproduction across years. We propose a general model of masting, integrating proximate factors (environmental variation, weather cues, and resource budgets) with ultimate drivers (predator satiation and pollination efficiency). This general model shows how the relationships between masting and weather shape the diverse responses of species to climate warming, ranging from no change to lower interannual variation or reproductive failure. The role of environmental prediction as a masting driver is being reassessed; future studies need to estimate prediction accuracy and the benefits acquired. Since reproduction is central to plant adaptation to climate change, understanding how masting adapts to shifting environmental conditions is now a central question.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution↗

USGS2022

MASTREE+: Time-series of plant reproductive effort from six continents

Significant gaps remain in understanding the response of plant reproduction to environmental change. This is partly because measuring reproduction in long-lived plants requires direct observation over many years and such datasets have rarely been made publicly available. Here we introduce MASTREE+, a data set that collates reproductive time-series data from across the globe and makes these data freely available to the community. MASTREE+ includes 73,828 georeferenced observations of annual reproduction (e.g. seed and fruit counts) in perennial plant populations worldwide. These observations consist of 5971 population-level time-series from 974 species in 66 countries. The mean and median time-series length is 12.4 and 10 years respectively, and the data set includes 1122 series that extend over at least two decades (≥20 years of observations). For a subset of well-studied species, MASTREE+ includes extensive replication of time-series across geographical and climatic gradients. Here we describe the open-access data set, available as a.csv file, and we introduce an associated web-based app for data exploration. MASTREE+ will provide the basis for improved understanding of the response of long-lived plant reproduction to environmental change. Additionally, MASTREE+ will enable investigation of the ecology and evolution of reproductive strategies in perennial plants, and the role of plant reproduction as a driver of ecosystem dynamics.

Global Change Biology↗