Abstract
In the course of data collection for studies examining plant-animal species interactions within ecological communities, many various and diverse types of field data are collected. However, one such class of field data which are seldom systematically collected and reported is that of the natural flowering phenology of a particular plant community. These flowering phenology data describe the time sequence of flowering (initiation, duration, termination) for all of the plant species occurring in that community. The dearth of such data is suprising in light of its importance for the testing of models describing the factors influencing timing of plant reproduction events within communities and for investigating the possible evolutionary selection pressures which may have acted to modify plant phenologies. Limited sets of flowering phenology data have been presented for only a few scattered commnities, including tall-grass prairie (Anderson and Schelfhout, 1980); dry, tropical forest (Frankie, Baker, and Opler, 1974); spring woodlands (Schemske et al., 1978); Canadian marshes/bogs (Pojar, 1974); and subalpine meadow (Holway and Ward, 1965). These reports have consisted of limited data sets collected for narrowly explicit studies. The present report summarizes the results of a flowering phenology survey of selected communities within the Grand Teton National Park ecosystem for the first half of the flowering season (June - July) of 1996.