In situ warming supports distinct flowering patterns in species and suggests resilience of plant–plant interactions.
Summary Climate warming commonly drives asymmetric shifts in flowering phenology among species, potentially disrupting plant–plant interactions and threatening ecosystem stability. However, the mechanisms driving these species‐specific phenological responses, and the extent to which resulting asynchrony destabilizes interspecific interactions, remain poorly understood. Using a 3‐yr in situ warming experiment in a Tibetan alpine grassland, we monitored seasonal flowering patterns of 29 species and quantified interaction potentials across 812 species pairs from their flowering‐time overlap. Warming advanced the start of the flowering season in 75.9% of species and the end of the flowering season in 69.0%, with greater phenological shifts in late‐ than early‐flowering species, in insect‐ than wind‐pollinated species, and with more similar shifts in closely related species than in distantly related species. By contrast, warming significantly altered the interaction potential in only 6.8% of species pairs (55/812), independent of the pairwise phylogenetic distance. Our results advance understanding of species‐specific phenological shifts in alpine grasslands and reveal that warming may induce substantial phenological reassembly without necessarily disrupting plant–plant interactions, suggesting resilience of ecological networks to phenological change.
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