2025-06-232025-06-232025-04-09Pareja Bonilla, D., Ortiz Ballesteros, P.L., Cerdeira Morellato, L.P. y Arista, M. (2025). Functional traits predict changes in floral phenology underclimate change in a highly diverse Mediterranean community. Functional Ecology, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.70062.1365-24350269-8463https://hdl.handle.net/11441/1745631. Plants are shifting their flowering phenology in response to climate change, buttrends differ between species and communities. Functional traits can largely ex-plain how different species respond to climate change by shifting their phenology,and can therefore help predicting which species will be most affected by climatechange. 2. Here we studied how functional traits affected the response to climate changeof the flowering phenology of 269 species from a Mediterranean community be-tween two periods in the last 35 years. 3. We used circular statistics to assess whether the community means for the startof flowering, start of intense flowering, end of intense flowering, and end of flow-ering had advanced in the last 35 years. Then, we fitted generalised linear mixedmodels to assess the influence of vegetative and reproductive functional traitson the shift of the start of flowering, start of intense flowering, end of intenseflowering, end of flowering, flowering duration, and intense flowering duration. 4. The flowering phenology of our study community advanced significantly in re-sponse to climate change, and both vegetative and reproductive functional traitsinfluenced phenological change. We demonstrated that woody species, shortones, species with wider leaves, high specific leaf area (SLA) values, larger flow-ers, early flowering, or short flowering periods were advancing more the start oftheir flowering, while taller plants, species with high SLA values, or early flower-ing were advancing more the end of their flowering. Consistently, taller specieswith wider leaves and early flowering species with short flowering time durationwere increasing more the duration of their flowering. 5. We showed that phenological shifts associated with climate change are condi-tioned by functional traits in a different way than previously reported for higherlatitudes, indicating that these responses are highly context dependent. In ourMediterranean community, reproductive traits were important for predictingspecies flowering shifts, indicating that plant species reproduction during thehottest and driest periods of the year—the Mediterranean resting season—may be compromised, along with the persistence of animals that depend on floralresources.application/pdf16 p.engAttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Climate changeCommunityFloweringFunctional traitsMediterraneanPhenologyReproductive traitsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess10.1111/1365-2435.70062