Abstract
Accumulating scientific evidence has demonstrated widespread shifts in the biological seasons. These shifts may modify seasonal interspecific interactions, with consequent impacts upon reproductive success and survival. However, current understanding of these impacts is based upon a limited number of studies that adopt a simplified ‘bottom-up’ food-chain paradigm, at a local scale. I argue that there is much insight to be gained by widening the scope of phenological studies to incorporate food-web interactions and landscape-scale processes across a diversity of ecosystem types, with the ultimate goal of developing a generic understanding of the systems most vulnerable to synchrony effects in the future. I propose that co-location of predator and prey phenological monitoring at sentinel sites, acting as research platforms for detailed food-web studies, experimentation and match-up with earth observation data, would be an important first step in this endeavour.
Highlights
Shifts in the biological seasons indicate that climate change is already impacting ecosystems [1]
Breeding success in insectivorous passerines is linked to the relative seasonal timing of chick provisioning and peaks in caterpillar food resources [7], whereas survival of caribou calves correlates with the relative timing of seasonal vegetative growth and birth date [8]
Perch recruitment is partially dependent upon the seasonality of spawning compared with seasonal food resources [9]
Summary
Shifts in the biological seasons indicate that climate change is already impacting ecosystems [1]. These phenological changes are near ubiquitous: manifest in the seasonal activities of many taxa [2,3,4]. Effects on trophic interactions are widely discussed (sensu the ‘match–mismatch’ hypothesis [6]), whereby consumer populations are predicted to decline when the seasonal timing of their peak energy demand changes at a different rate from the seasonal timing of prey/resource peaks. We need to understand and quantify the impacts of changing synchrony, in order to improve our ability to predict future ecological impacts of phenological shifts. Sentinel sites as research hubs ground-truthing modelling, experimentation, food-web study upscaling and mapping of phenology change and mismatching?
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