In the family Fagaceae, fertilization is delayed by several weeks to 1 year after pollination, leading to 1‐ or 2‐year fruiting species depending on whether fruiting occurs in the same or the next year after flowering. To investigate physiological responses underlying the regulation of delayed fertilization, we monitored seasonal changes in genome‐wide gene expression in tissues including leaves and buds over 2 years under nat...

Significant gaps remain in understanding the response of plant reproduction to environmental change. This is partly because measuring reproduction in long‐lived plants requires direct observation over many years and such datasets have rarely been made publicly available. Here we introduce MASTREE+, a data set that collates reproductive time‐series data from across the globe and makes these data freely available to the communit...

Highly variable and synchronised production of seeds by plant populations, known as masting, is implicated in many important ecological processes, but how it arises remains poorly understood. The lack of experimental studies prevents underlying mechanisms from being explicitly tested, and thereby precludes meaningful predictions on the consequences of changing environments for plant reproductive patterns and global vegetation...

Elucidating the physiological mechanisms of the irregular yet concerted flowering rhythm of mass flowering tree species in the tropics requires long‐term monitoring of flowering phenology, exogenous and endogenous environmental factors, as well as identifying interactions and dependencies among these factors. To investigate the proximate factors for floral initiation of mast seeding trees in the tropics, we monitored the expre...

Synchronised and fluctuating reproduction by plant populations, called masting, is widespread in diverse taxonomic groups. Here, we propose a new method to explore the proximate mechanism of masting by combining spatiotemporal flowering data, biochemical analysis of resource allocation and mathematical modelling. Flowering data of 170 trees over 13 years showed the emergence of clustering with trees in a given cluster mutually...

The role of resource availability in determining the incidence of masting has been widely studied, but how floral transition and initiation are regulated by the resource level is unclear. We tested the hypothesis that floral transition is stimulated by high resource availabiltiy in Fagus crenata based on a new technique, the expression analyses of flowering genes. We isolated F. crenata orthologues of FLOWERING LOCUS T , LEAFY...

Many tree species produce far more fruits than eventually mature, with a large proportion of developing fruits being aborted midway through the development process. Whether this is a maternally controlled late‐acting self‐incompatibility mechanism, or an expression of inbreeding depression, is difficult to determine. In either case, however, selection is expected to favor early abortion of inbred or incompatible zygotes to min...