Do trees that grow naturally in places like florida lose their leaves in winter or do they keep them year round? If they keep them year round what if you put one of those trees in a northern state like Michigan, would it keep its leaves all year and die in winter? What if you took a northern tree like a maple and put it in south florida, would it still shed its leaves in fall or would it keep them year round?
There are many deciduous trees in the tropics. However, they lose their leaves in the dry season, since there is no cold season. Whether a deciduous tree, whether cold-deciduous or dry-deciduous, loses its leaves when transplanted to another climate depends on the exact cues that trigger leaf loss, which could be day length, temperature, or drought stress, depending on the species.
Italicized items are quotes from: http://www.biology.ku.edu/tropical_tree_phenology/veg.html
*Periods of low rainfall, during which evapotranspiration exceeds precipitation and soil water content declines, constitute the principal climatic constraint in tropical dry forests with minimal variation in monthly temperature. With increasing distance from the equator, between 7 and 20° N and S, annual rainfall decreases and seasonal drought becomes longer and more severe. Along this gradient, tropical forests change from evergreen rainforests to semideciduous or deciduous dry forests, also referred to as monsoon forests. In general, the dry season starts around the winter solstice and the wet season begins several weeks before the summer solstice.
*
It is these dry monsoon forests where you find most of the tropical deciduous trees.
Many tropical trees will drop all of their old leaves in one flush, which is followed by flowering, and then after the flowers fade, they grow new leaves back.
*Among individual trees of deciduous species the opportunistic pattern of seasonal development varies greatly with site water availability and the large inter-annual variation in rainfall characteristic of monsoon forests. In tropical lowlands, the leafless period may range from 5-6 months in trees at dry upland sites to a few weeks in trees near a river. With increasing altitude and the corresponding decline in dry season water stress, the leafless period becomes progressively shorter and deciduous species may become leaf-exchanging (e.g., Erythrina, Tabebuia; 2, 19, 22). At the same microsite, deciduousness may vary from year to year by 2-3 months with the time of the last and first rains of the wet season. The timing of leaf shedding and subsequent flushing may also vary by several weeks between exposed and shaded branches within the same tree crown *
As you can tell from the above paragraph, some tropical trees have a period of deciduousness comparable to temperate trees.
Many tropical trees which have relatives in northern areas, like Maples (yes, there are tropical maples. One species even crosses the equator, Acer laurium in Indonesia, although this is an evergreen maple). So deciduousness is something that is widespread in these families because it is useful in both cold winter areas, and in dry tropical areas. A good example within the US is Aesculus (Buckeye).
Most of the trees in that genus are winter deciduous. However, Aesculus californica is native to the dry summer climate of California, and unless they grow near perennial streams, they will drop their leaves soon after the winter rains. They stand out among other trees in summer and are easy to spot then. But, if they are grown where they get a summer supply of moisture, they can hold their leaves until fall.
In analogy to tropical deciduous trees, the period of deciduousness in temperate trees varies with the duration of the growing season (monthly mean temperature above 5-7° C). Along a N-S gradient from the northern US to tropical Florida and Mexico the phenology of wide-ranging tree species such as maple (Acer) and beech (Fagus) changes from 6-month-deciduous in the North to a leaf-exchanging pattern in their southern range.
In areas where it freezes in winter, it’s a lot like a drought since the soil is frozen and the water is unavailable to the trees. Winter in places where the soil freezes is like the equivalent of the tropical dry season in a sense.
Some of the tropical drought deciduous trees are actually triggered into shedding leaves by decreasing daylight at the Autumnal equinox. These same trees then leaf out when the spring equinox occurs because the rainy season soon follows. This allows them to have leaves out as soon as the rains come so they can get a fast start on growth.
As for what temperate winter deciduous trees do in warm winter places, I can tell you that at least for species like Liquidambars, they tend to do an incomplete drop of their leaves, sometimes keeping them all the way through winter here (our temperatures in winter barely dip below freezing). Some trees like Maples will do a complete drop here, as all the maples i’ve seen lose their entire canopies. Some plants will flush into flowering as soon as their minimum winter chill requirements are set (like Cherries and plums).