Genomics highlight an underestimation of the urban heat island effect on red oak phenology

Abstract

The phenological timing of leaf-out in temperate forests is a critical transition point each year, altering the global climate system via changes to carbon and hydrologic cycles and land-surface albedo. In turn, climate is impacting phenology by advancing leaf-out an average of 2.8 +/-0.35 days per decade as the planet warms. Thus, understanding the relationship between warming and leaf-out is critical for understanding future global change. Rural-to-urban gradients in temperature, which result in clines over which urban areas are up to 4{degrees}C warmer than their surrounding countryside (dubbed the urban heat island - UHI - effect), may be used as a space-for-time substitution in studies of response to climate change. However, studies have recently highlighted that using the UHI effect over space rather than measurements at the same site through time results in consistently weaker relationships between temperature and leaf-out date in spring (i.e., urban-to-rural gradients underpredict the impact of warming on leaf-out). While such studies suggest many potential environmental explanations, the effect of genetic diversity is often neglected. While sensitive to environmental warming, leaf-out phenology is also highly heritable. Given that rural areas are largely natural sites, they likely have higher intraspecific genetic diversity than urban sites, where plants are selected by land managers for a narrow set of resilience traits. Here we measured the environment, genomic background, and phenological timing of northern red oak (Q. rubra) over several years between an urban and rural site to demonstrate how genetic background explains why the UHI effect leads to an underprediction of plant response to warming. Using a space-for-time substitution, we found that the date of leaf-out at our sites is predicted to advance approximately 20 days over the next 80 years. However, if we further account for the genomic background at the two sites, leaf-out, phenology is predicted to advance 22 days; a 10% difference between the two models. We demonstrate that this stronger relationship is because urban trees are largely a monoculture and, moreover, are most closely related to individuals at the rural site that leaf out latest. We highlight the critical need to consider genetic background, particularly in studies examining highly heritable traits, because both environment and genetics are changing across rural-to-urban gradients.