Climatic sensitivity of reproductive phenology in Southeast Asian forest biomes

My prospective PhD thesis falls under plant and climate science, specifically biogeography and ecology amid a rapidly changing climate. Plant reproduction, i.e., flowering and fruiting, where animal and human food security and survival are highly dependent, usually follows a periodic cycle. This cycle is determined mostly by seasons, which are straightforward in temperate regions but not so much in the tropics, where daylight, temperature, and rainfall are thought to be very uniform throughout the year.

This overgeneralization of tropical climate has impeded our understanding of when flowers and fruits become available in the region and how this availability may change given an increasingly warming planet. This gap is magnified in data-deficient Southeast Asia, which is exposed to more weather disturbances like monsoon and El Nino, owing to its Pacific location.

Understanding and predicting changes in plant reproduction in response to changing climate are important in ensuring future-smart conservation strategies and food resilience in the region in the coming decades.

My research topic is currently broad and I foresee conducting first a systematic review of tropical phenology studies in Southeast Asia to narrow down the specific research questions that I may efficiently pursue given time and resources. Nevertheless, with prior guidance from my prospective supervisors, Dr. Mark Hughes and Dr.

Peter Wilkie from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and Dr. Richard Milne from the School of Biological Sciences, I intend to correlate climate with patterns of flowering and fruiting in the region across discrete units. These units may be geographic like islands or elevation gradients, morpho-physiological like functional traits of wood and fruit types, phylogenetic like plant families or tribes, or ecological like specific tropical ecosystems, among others.

To do this, I plan to collect and organise bioclimatic data in different relevant time steps, and plant diversity data from herbarium specimens and long-term ecological research sites. While tropical climatic data have been expanded in scale, refined in resolution, and made more accessible in the past decade, plant diversity data, especially in Southeast Asia, remain sparsely available, especially given the unequal advancements in digitisation across countries.

Aside from the need for imaging efforts and machine learning to unlock this massive data more efficiently, comprehensive phenological studies require long-term data across vast geographic space and more comprehensive correlation analyses. For this, I look forward to joining ongoing joint training in big data analytical techniques under both Schools of Biological Sciences and Informatics.

Since climatic and biodiversity data transcend geopolitical borders, I anticipate forging collaborations for data generation between countries, institutions, and the public through citizen science, while ensuring inclusivity in gender, race, and religion in the process. Ultimately, I hope to produce publicly consumable reports through time maps of current patterns of flowering and fruiting in Southeast Asia according to select discrete units, and future-projected maps given different climate scenarios.

These maps would be valuable in crafting future-smart conservation and food planning strategies and policies in Southeast Asia in the next decades.