Phenological overlap of interacting species in a changing climate: an assessment of available approaches

Abstract

Concern regarding the biological effects of climate change has led to a recent surge in research to understand the consequences of phenological change for species interactions. This rapidly expanding research program is centered on three lines of inquiry: (1) how the phenological overlap of interacting species is changing, (2) why the phenological overlap of interacting species is changing, and (3) how the phenological overlap of interacting species will change under future climate scenarios. We synthesize the widely disparate approaches currently being used to investigate these questions: (1) interpretation of long-term phenological data, (2) field observations, (3) experimental manipulations, (4) simulations and nonmechanistic models, and (5) mechanistic models. We present a conceptual framework for selecting approaches that are best matched to the question of interest. We weigh the merits and limitations of each approach, survey the recent literature from diverse systems to quantify their use, and characterize the types of interactions being studied by each of them. We highlight the value of combining approaches and the importance of long-term data for establishing a baseline of phenological synchrony. Future work that scales up from pairwise species interactions to communities and ecosystems, emphasizing the use of predictive approaches, will be particularly valuable for reaching a broader understanding of the complex effects of climate change on the phenological overlap of interacting species. It will also be important to study a broader range of interactions: to date, most of the research on climate-induced phenological shifts has focused on terrestrial pairwise resource–consumer interactions, especially those between plants and insects.

The significance and scope of evolutionary developmental biology: a vision for the 21st century

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Estimating the onset of spring from a complex phenology database: trade-offs across geographic scales

“…Contemporary phenology data, collected recently and over short timeframes, can be used to examine the responsiveness of species to climate to better understand how climatic variability influences phenology (Rafferty et al 2013). In Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00484-015-1036-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.…”

Enhanced aphid abundance in spring desynchronizes predator–prey and plant–microorganism interactions

“…Climate change driven shifts in species phenology are expected to impact species abundances and interactions (Tylianakis et al 2008), as shown, e.g., in a disruption of predator–prey dynamics due to climate driven temporal desynchronization of peak abundances between prey and predators (Visser et al 2006). The majority of studies on phenological mismatches have focused on just two trophic levels, while studies considering three or more species levels are rare (Rafferty et al 2013). Primary consumers are more susceptible to climate change than primary producers and secondary consumers which can cause mismatches along trophic cascades (Thackeray et al 2016).…”