General flowering in temperate forests arises from multi-timescale community synchrony

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Community-wide “general flowering” has been regarded as a tropical phenomenon. Here, we show that temperate forests also exhibit community-wide flowering at the regional scale. Annual seed-production records for seven dominant tree species across 432 forest sites, analysed with timescale-explicit wavelet metrics, reveal landscape-scale synchrony structured by two periods — a 2–4-year band and a 5–8-year band — and associated with spatially coherent summer temperatures. This dual-band synchrony demonstrates that large-scale, cross-species reproductive alignment is an emergent property of temperate forest communities, implying shared climate cueing of reproduction and the potential for community-wide predator satiation. Since $\sim$2005, the short- and long-period synchrony has weakened, and the short-period signal has shifted towards $\sim$2 years (shorter period). Species-specific shifts in timescale structure no longer sum constructively, implying smaller, less predictable resource pulses at the community level, reduced community-wide predator satiation, and a decoupling of consumer–resource dynamics under continued warming. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2W08Q Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences Moran effect, mast seeding, spatial synchrony, seed production, community ecology, resource pulses, climate synchrony Published: 2026-02-03 10:20 Last Updated: 2026-02-03 10:20 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: none Language: English