Nowadays, attention is being paid to exploration of possibilities of exploiting new and under-utilized plant resources with the aim of meeting the growing societal needs. Calotropis procera is one among the many under-utilized species despite its many economic and ecological uses. This study was done to characterize the phenology of the species and determine its potential for domestication for wool production. Phenological data was used to generate charts that depicted the flowering and fruiting phenophases for three provenances for four seasons. The data was subjected to Test of Homogeneity of Variances to isolate significant differences in study parameters. Spearman rank pair-wise correlations between wet seasons and flowering were done. Flowering intensity in different months of the year was significantly different (p<0.05) with clear-cut flowering phenophases. Flowering and fruiting durations and active phases were significantly longer and high (p<0.001) during the wet seasons and spearman rank correlations between wet seasons and flowering ranged from 0.89 to 0.96 and were highly significant (rs, pair- wise correlations, p<0.0001). A very low flower to fruit ratio was recorded. The study concluded that C. procera can do well as a plantation crop and has a high potential for production of wool. The strongest impediment to flowering and fruiting was periodic attack by Aphis nerii. It is recommended that propagation seeds for C. procera should be sourced from the local provenances to reduce the effects of seed source transfer distance.
Tag: flowering
Climatic drivers and ecological implications of variation in the time interval between leaf-out and flowering
Leaf-out and flowering in any given species have evolved to occur in a predetermined sequence, with the inter-stage time interval optimized to maximize plant fitness. Although warming-induced advances of both leaf-out and flowering are well documented, it remains unclear whether shifts in these phenological phases differ in magnitudes and whether changes have occurred in the length of the inter-stage intervals. Here, we present an extensive synthesis of warming effects on flower-leaf time intervals, using long-term (1963–2014) and in situ data consisting of 11,858 leaf-out and flowering records for 183 species across China. We found that the timing of both spring phenological events was generally advanced, indicating a dominant impact of forcing conditions compared with chilling. Stable time intervals between leaf-out and flowering prevailed for most of the time series despite increasing temperatures; however, some of the investigated cases featured significant changes in the time intervals. The latter could be explained by differences in the temperature sensitivity (ST) between leaf and flower phenology. Greater ST for flowering than for leaf-out caused flowering times to advance faster than leaf emergence. This shortened the inter-stage intervals in leaf-first species and lengthened them in flower-first species. Variation in the time intervals between leaf-out and flowering events may have far-reaching ecological and evolutionary consequences, with implications for species fitness, intra/inter-species interactions, and ecosystem structure, function, and stability.