Abstract: It is well established that plant distributions are strongly influenced by climate. Understanding the environmental factors that shape species distributions at large geographic, temporal, and taxonomic scales has gained tremendous urgency for predicting future range shifts of species and to assess the associated consequences to biodiversity in the face of Anthropogenic change. Species distribution models (SDMs), which link species known occurrences to environmental data, are widespread tools to predict species current distributions and forecast future distributions under climate changes. However, nearly all SDMs are based solely on abiotic factors. Importantly, a strictly abiotic approach to this question misses critical biotic information that have potentially major effects on species ranges. Phenology is one of the most critical climate change response traits for species fitness and shaping species distributions. It is far less known how plant phenology modulating the species response along environmental gradients. Here, we used newly developed phenology-based SDMs to assess how plant reproductive phenology (budding, flowering and fruiting time) shifts will affect the species distribution pattern across the eastern United States under future climate changes. We found in general, phenology-based SDM projected severe habitat loss of plants across the eastern United States under future climate change. However, phenology-based SDM projected species range loss that were less alarming compared to typical SDM. This difference may be attributed to the inclusion of plasticity component in the model. Taking into account phenology allow us to get more accurate and realistic future projections. Our study suggest that future conservation programs should look beyond to typical SDM, and not neglect the biological processes controlling the species response to climate change.
