Abstract
Climate change is placing increasing pressure on forests around the world, and its potential impacts on the reproductive capacity of individuals are yet poorly understood. Many forest tree species reproduce following so-called masting patterns, in which seed production is intermittent and synchronized among individuals, whose drivers need to be identified in order to better understand the impact of climate on the fecundity of forest trees. The general objective of this thesis is to deepen our knowledge of the environmental drivers of the fecundity of forest trees and their interactions, by focusing on the holm oak, a widespread species in the Mediterranean basin. It also aimed to determine how fecundity could be impacted by climate change, and to develop a process-based model capable of predicting this impact. This thesis work combines analyses of long-term monitoring in a holm oak forest exposed to a rainfall exclusion experiment, experimental manipulations of source-sink interactions involved in the resource allocation to reproduction, and modelling. I have shown that reproduction was strongly regulated by weather conditions during the reproductive cycle and in particular by the water availability in summer-autumn, and to a lesser extent by the availability of carbon and nutrients, as well as by competition between fruits and new buds. My experimental results show that the allocation of resources to reproduction could be modified in case of resource limitation due to defoliation; and that developing fruits have a negative impact on the dynamics of nitrogen and zinc reserves in branches, as well as on the production of female flowers the following year. Long-term observations show that multi-year rainfall reduction induce a decrease in the number of fruits produced which is additional to the interannual variability and that tree reproduction does not acclimate to drought. Finally, within the PHENOFIT model, I have developed a fecundity model based on the assumptions and results from my work and from the literature.