查看文章

Masting, the highly variable production of synchronized large seed crops, is a common reproductive strategy in plant populations. In wind‐pollinated trees, flowering and pollination dynamics are hypothesized to provide the mechanistic link for the well‐known relationship between weather and population‐level seed production. Several hypotheses make predictions about the effect of weather on annual pollination success. The pollen coupling hypothesis predicts that weather and plant resources drive the flowering effort of trees, which directly translates into the size of seed crops through efficient pollination. In contrast, the pollination Moran effect hypothesis predicts that weather affects pollination efficiency, leading to occasional bumper crops. Furthermore, the recently formulated phenology synchrony hypothesis predicts that Moran effects can arise because of weather effects on flowering synchrony, which, in turn …