PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - R. W. McClory
AU  - L. J. A. van Dijk
AU  - J. Mutz
AU  - J. Ehrlén
AU  - A. J. M. Tack
TI  - Spring phenology dominates over shade in affecting seedling performance and plant attack during the growing season
AID  - 10.1101/2020.01.05.895086
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.01.05.895086
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/06/2020.01.05.895086.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/06/2020.01.05.895086.full
AB  - Climate change is affecting both the abiotic environment and the seasonal timing of life history events, with potentially major consequences for plant performance and plant-associated food webs. Despite this, we lack insights into how effects of plant phenology on plant performance and food webs depend on environmental conditions, and to what extent effects of phenology and the environment on plant performance are direct vs. mediated by changes in the plant-associated community.We conducted a multifactorial field experiment to test for the effect of spring phenology and shade on Quercus robur seedling traits and performance, as well as attacks by specialist plant pathogens, insects and small mammals.Spring phenology strongly affected seedling performance whereas shade only affected leaf thickness and chlorophyll. Likewise, spring phenology strongly affected herbivore and pathogen attack, whereas shade and its interaction with spring phenology only explained a minor part of the variation. Small mammals preferentially attacked later phenology seedlings, which strongly affected plant survival, while insect herbivores and pathogens did not mediate the effect of spring phenology and shade on plant performance.Synthesis: This study highlights that the effect of spring phenology outweighs the effect of environmental context on plant performance and plant attack during the growing season. Interestingly, small mammal herbivores, and not diseases and insect herbivores, may play a key role in mediating the effect of spring phenology on plant performance. Together, these findings advance our understanding of the consequences of climate-induced changes in spring phenology and the abiotic environment on plant performance within a community context.