There is great diversity in the flowering time sensitivity to temperature of Arctic plant species, suggesting climate change implications for Arctic ecological communities, including altered community composition, competition, and pollinator interactions.
Seed dispersal times have advanced at double the rate of flowering times over the past 120 years, reflecting greater late‐summer temperature rises in Nunavut. Flowering times and seed dispersal time were most strongly correlated with June and July temperatures, respectively. Broadly speaking, this research serves as a proof of concept to assess whether phenology–climate change studies using historic data can be conducted at large spatial scales. We tested this at different spatial scales and compared the sensitivity in different regions of Nunavut. We used flowering and seed dispersal times of 23 Arctic species from herbarium specimens, photographs, and field observations collected from across the 2.1 million km 2 area of Nunavut, Canada, to determine (1) which monthly temperatures influence flowering and seed dispersal times (2) species’ phenological sensitivity to temperature and (3) whether flowering or seed dispersal times have advanced over the past 120 years. Conducting similar localised studies in the Canadian Arctic, however, poses a challenge where the collection of herbarium specimens, photographs, and field observations have been temporally and spatially sporadic. Herbarium specimens, photographs, and field observations can provide historical phenology records and have been used, on a localised scale, to predict species’ phenological sensitivity to climate change. The timing of flowering and fruiting (phenology) is often temperature dependent and tends to advance as the climate warms. The pace of climate change in the Arctic is dramatic, with temperatures rising at a rate double the global average.
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