• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.110 no.3
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• pp.322-340
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• 2021

Due to climate change and its consequential spring temperature rise, flowering time of Robinia pseudoacacia has advanced and a simultaneous blooming phenomenon occurred in different regions in South Korea. These changes in flowering time became a major crisis in the domestic beekeeping industry and the demand for accurate prediction of flowering time for R. pseudoacacia is increasing. In this study, we developed and compared performance of four different models predicting flowering time of R. pseudoacacia for the entire country: a Single Model for the country (SM), Modified Single Model (MSM) using correction factors derived from SM, Group Model (GM) estimating parameters for each region, and Local Model (LM) estimating parameters for each site. To achieve this goal, the bloom date data observed at 26 points across the country for the past 12 years (2006-2017) and daily temperature data were used. As a result, bloom dates for the north central region, where spring temperature increase was more than two-fold higher than southern regions, have advanced and the differences compared with the southwest region decreased by 0.7098 days per year (p-value=0.0417). Model comparisons showed MSM and LM performed better than the other models, as shown by 24% and 15% lower RMSE than SM, respectively. Furthermore, validation with 16 additional sites for 4 years revealed co-krigging of LM showed better performance than expansion of MSM for the entire nation (RMSE: p-value=0.0118, Bias: p-value=0.0471). This study improved predictions of bloom dates for R. pseudoacacia and proposed methods for reliable expansion to the entire nation.