Climate drivers of adult insect activity are conditioned by life history traits

Abstract

Insect phenological lability is key for determining which species will adapt under environmental change. However, little is known about when adult insect activity terminates and overall activity duration. We used community-science and museum specimen data to investigate the effects of climate and urbanisation on timing of adult insect activity for 101 species varying in life history traits. We found detritivores and species with aquatic larval stages extend activity periods most rapidly in response to increasing regional temperature. Conversely, species with subterranean larval stages have relatively constant durations regardless of regional temperature. Species extended their period of adult activity similarly in warmer conditions regardless of voltinism classification. Longer adult durations may represent a general response to warming, but voltinism data in subtropical environments are likely underreported. This effort provides a framework to address the drivers of adult insect phenology at continental scales and a basis for predicting species response to environmental change.

Anthropogenic habitat modification alters calling phenology of frogs

“…Frogs may be breeding earlier in modified habitats to capitalize on higher quality or more abundant food (Loman, 2009 ); they may be tracking shifts in insect phenology observed in urban areas (Hart et al, 2018 ), given their dependence on insects (Le et al, 2020 ). Phenological flexibility may be an important determinant of persistence in anthropogenically modified environments (Belitz et al, 2021 ). Breeding when resources and environmental conditions are not conducive to reproduction can cause failed reproduction, high larval mortality, increased competition and predation among sympatric species and, in more extreme cases, population declines and local extinctions (Klaus & Lougheed, 2013 ; Mayor et al, 2017 ; Todd et al, 2011 ).…”

Phenological research based on natural history collections: Practical guidelines and a lepidopteran case study

“…Many species that met minimum requirements for generating phenometrics were dropped from further analyses because of lack of available trait data. Given that species traits regulate insect phenological responses (Belitz et al, 2021;Diamond et al, 2011), modelling frameworks addressing interspecific variation in temperature sensitivity must incorporate trait data (Kharouba et al, 2018). We recognize the challenges of assembling complete trait data and therefore emphasize the importance of choosing traits that are documentable and are expected to impact phenology.…”

“…Our decision to use these three modelling approaches was that it generated competing top models following multiple approaches used in the literature (Belitz et al, 2021;Li et al, 2021) and encapsulates best practices for ecological modelling with the goal of data exploration (Tredennick et al, 2021).…”

LepTraits 1.0 A globally comprehensive dataset of butterfly traits

“…Species associations have been used to understand key drivers of diversification such as symbioses 22 and host plant use 23 . Traits have also been used to understand the efficacy of species-distribution modeling approaches to forecast changes in species’ ranges 11 and to understand differential flight phenology responses 24 . As the popularity of these analytical approaches increases, roadmaps for conducting such analyses have been published to facilitate the reproducibility of functional diversity studies.…”