Professor Yuyu Zhou’s recent publication in Nature Communications

Tree species composition governs urban phenological responses to warming

Reference: Wu, Z., Zohner, C.M., Zhou, Y. et al. Tree species composition governs urban phenological responses to warming. Nat Commun 16, 3696 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58927-8

Brief summary: Urban areas serve as natural laboratories for studying phenological responses to climate change, due to warmer conditions relative to surrounding rural regions. In a new study published in Nature Communications, an international team of researchers, including those from HKU, investigated how species composition influences these phenological responses to urbanization across cities in the Northern Hemisphere. By combining manipulative experiments, satellite-derived phenology data, and georeferenced tree occurrence records, the study demonstrates that differences in the temperature sensitivity of spring phenology between urban and rural trees are largely driven by variation in species composition, surpassing the preseason temperature. This pattern is particularly pronounced in Asian cities. These findings highlight the critical role of species composition in understanding ecological responses to climate warming in urban areas.

Fig. 1: Effects of urban-rural differences in species composition (beta diversity) on urban-rural variation in the start-of-growing season (ΔSOS) and the temperature sensitivity of SOS (ΔST) using the outward delineation method.

Fig. 2: Drivers of urban-rural variation in temperature sensitivity of the start of season (ΔST).

Fig. 3: Experimental evidence for the effects of urbanization on spring phenology.

Fig. 4: Conceptual diagram of how differences in the phenological responsiveness among species may affect the urban-rural variation in temperature sensitivity of spring phenology (ST) at the vegetation level.