5 | Conclusions

Our study highlighted that the influence of functional traits on flowering phenology is far more greater than abiotic factors under N addition and plant diversity loss in an assemblage grasslands through a common garden experiment, and the driver of flowering phenology was varied with phenological stages, which suggests that functional traits should include in phenology models to improve prediction of the response of phenology to global changes. Moreover, advance in the last flowering day and shortened in flowering duration is accompanied with the increase of flower numbers, which indicated that changes in functional traits not only altered the flowering phenology, but also heralded the changes in reproductive strategy of plants under global changes.