Plant-pollinator interactions are an integral part of many terrestrial ecosystems. Within agricultural systems, plant-pollinator interactions account for a portion of fruit and vegetable production. Within natural ecosystems, plant-pollinator interactions contribute to increasing biodiversity and resource availability for organisms. However; phenological mismatches caused by global climate change have the potential to decouple plants and pollinators partnerships through timing and emergence issues. Phenological mismatch can be defined as a change in life history timing that affects interactions between species, with the life stage of one or more species occurring earlier or later than recent historical norms. These mismatches can be in the form of accelerated snow melt causing flowers to emerge faster than pollinators are foraging for pollen sources. As the impacts of global climate change increase, so does the potential for phenological mismatch between species. This project examines accelerated snowmelt, an artifact of climate change, and its impacts on the phenology, pollination, and seed set of a subalpine plant, Delphinium nuttallianum. To test pollination limitation within Delphinium nuttallianum, I compared three pollination treatments; open, open-hand and exclusion. These treatments were conducted within two manipulated plots and two control plots. The manipulated plots simulated global climate change via accelerated snow-melt, and the control plots were kept consistent.
Results/Conclusions
We hypothesized that D. nuttallianum was pollen limited and that pollination and seed production would be lower in plots with accelerated snow melt. We counted >600 seeds and linked seed production to pollen availability and accelerated snow melt. The exclusion treatments had a mean of 2.3 developed seeds, the open treatments had a mean of 5.45 developed seeds and the open-hand treatments had a mean of 7 developed seeds. The standard deviation of the developed seeds were 3.0128. For this experiment, it was seen that Delphinium nuttallianum produced more developed seeds in the manipulated plot, leading us to the consensus that with earlier emergence and no pollen limitation, Delphinium nuttallianum has a larger developed seed production than when it is pollen limited and emerges later. As a pilot study, this is both significant and innovative due to this species of flower having a limited amount of research behind it and due to its potential to give insight about the effects of Global Climate Change.