Title has changed as 'Consequences of soil and climatic variability for fig phenology'. Figs are often regarded as keystone plants for their role in maintaining frugivore populations. This results from their year-round flowering and fruiting behaviour, which means fig fruits are often available when other fruit resources are scarce. This behaviour is a direct consequence of their dependence for pollination on highly specific, but short-lived (1-3 days), wasps that breed inside the inflorescence. Continuous flowering at the population-level is a necessary condition for the mutualism to persist, as any substantial break in the supply of breeding sites for the pollinations would lead to their extinction. However, in most tropical forest with relatively strong seasonality figs do show some degree of seasonality in their flowering and fruiting phenology. In Borneo extreme droughts have been shown to cause local extinction of pollinators among dioecious figs, but had less impact on the large monoecious species, associated with large fruit crops. However, how figs respond to the less severe droughts that are thought to trigger masting events is not well understood. In this paper I compare Ficus phenology among species and sites to investigate the climatic and edaphic factors affecting fig fruit production.