COS 94-4 - Current and lagged climate affects phenology across diverse taxonomic groups

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

2:15 PM – 2:30 PM EDT

Location: 518A

Presenting Author(s)

BI

Brian D. Inouye, PhD

Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida, United States

Coauthor(s)

RP

Rebecca M. Prather

Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL, United States
RD

Rebecca M. Dalton

Ecologist
US EPA, United States
bb

billy barr

RMBL, United States
DB

Daniel T. Blumstein

UCLA, United States
CB

Carol L. Boggs

University South Carolina, United States
AB

Alison K. Brody

University of Vermont
Burlington, VT, United States
DI

David W. Inouye, PhD

RMBL, United States
RI

Rebecca E. Irwin

North Carolina State University, United States
JM

Julien Martin

Department of Biology, University of Ottawa, Canada
RS

Rosemary J. Smith

RMBL, United States
DV

Dirk H. Van Vuren

UC Davis, United States
CW

Caitlin P. Wells

Colorado State University, United States
HW

Howard H. Whiteman

Professor
Murray State University, United States
NU

Nora Underwood

Department of Biological Science, Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL, United States

Background/Question/Methods

Understanding climate effects on the phenology of plants and animals, the timing of important life-history events, is challenging. Weather is changing at different rates across seasons, organisms use different weather variables as phenological cues, and the interval between cues and phenological events such as emergence, reproduction, or activity varies among species. To explore how responses to climate cues differ among taxonomic groups, and whether phenology shows a lagged response to climate variables from prior growing seasons, we collated first-sighting and median-activity phenological events for 30 plant, 25 insect, 16 bird, 2 mammal, and 1 amphibian species representing 10,812 phenological events across 45 years (1975 – 2020) and compared these to climate data. All data are from high elevation environments at or near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, in Colorado. We used multivariate climate space to determine the relative importance of different climate effects on the phenology of all organisms examined.

Results/Conclusions

Our results revealed important climate drivers of phenology and demonstrate that both current and prior climate predicted change in the timing of phenological events. Taxa responded to some cues similarly, such as snowmelt date and spring temperatures. Earlier snowmelt dates and warmer springs were associated with earlier phenology for almost all species and phenological metrics. However, other cues resulted in different effects across taxa; for example, prior summer precipitation delayed first activity of some insects but advanced activity of some amphibians, mammals, and birds. Arrival times for migratory birds were affected by migration distances, not just conditions in their summer destination. Our results also emphasize the importance of examining which cues are driving a species’ entire phenological distribution, as focusing only on cues driving first activity could provide inaccurate predictions for the remainder of a species’ phenological activity; important predictors of median phenology metrics sometimes differed from predictors for first-observed phenology metrics. Finally, by comparing phenological responses of diverse taxa at a single location we show there are more climate drivers of phenology than previous studies have considered, and that the most important climate cues often differ among taxonomic groups.