Factors Driving Autumn Quercus Flowering in a Thermo-Mediterranean Area

The flowering period of plants is a critical time since it determines their reproductive success. Flowering is controlled by different factors including genetic regulation and environmental conditions. In the Mediterranean area, favourable conditions usually occur in spring, when most plant species flower including those of the Mediterranean Quercus genus. This paper reveals and analyses an unusual and lesser-known phenomenon occurring in the two main Mediterranean agroforestry ecosystems of South Europe, the Mediterranean forest and “dehesa”, that is, a second flowering occurring in autumn for the species Quercus ilex subsp. ballota (holm oak). The continuous pollen monitoring of the atmosphere in the city of Cordoba (southern Spain) for 25 years, together with field phenological observations in the area, has indicated that, apart from the main pollination period in spring, secondary flowerings also occasionally occur in this area, specifically in autumn. The present work examines these uncommon pollination events detected in the autumns of certain years with the aim of determining the main environmental factors that influence and control them. During the 25-year study period, there were 7 years in which a secondary Quercus flowering was detected in the area from the second half of October until the end of November. The univariate statistical analysis of the influence of environmental variables determined that the meteorological conditions in September were the most influential. Low mean temperatures, together with record rainfall in that month, led to autumn flowering events. The phenological characteristics of the spring pollen season were also influential. In the years with a shorter spring, the Quercus pollen season tended to present autumn flowerings. A multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) model was built to explain the effects of the different variables on the occurrence of autumn pollination. The results indicated that the combined effect of three predicting variables, September rainfall, the length of the spring pollen season, and the end of the spring pollen season, explained 92% of the variance. The validation showed a strong relationship between the expected and the observed autumn pollen concentrations. Therefore, the present analysis of a long-term pollen database revealed that the main causes of this unusual second flowering in autumn were strongly related to climate change, i.e., strong dry summers and warm autumns. In addition, the results showed that the phenomenon was more frequent in the years with low pollination during spring due to different meteorological events potentiated by climate change, such as dryness or heavy rain episodes, as a way of ensuring acorn crops. The results explain how this unusual and lesser-known phenomenon in agroforestry dynamics is related to the adaptation to climate change and the main factors that are driving it, as well as the potential consequences for these important and endangered Mediterranean ecosystems.