My colleagues and I have a new manuscript out! Published in New Phytologist, we used 46 years of digitized multi-environment trial data for hundreds of genotypes of agricultural sunflower to examine the relationship between flower timing, crop yield (reproductive performance), and climate.
Dr. Eliza Clark led this publication along with Dr. Sarah Elmendorf. Please check out their work and consider reading this manuscript.
Figure 5: Model predictions of optimal number of days to flowering across a range of planting days, average site degree days, and yearly anomalies. Predicted optimal days to flowering is indicated by the color of each cell. The black square outline on each panel shows a site with an average of about 900 growing degree days planted on the same day in four scenarios of varying yearly temperature anomaly.