Climate change and the importance of timing for the ecological consequences of extreme weather

Background/Question/Methods

Climate change is increasing the intensity, duration, and frequency of extreme climate events, such as heat waves, droughts, fires, severe storms, and floods. A growing body of work is documenting the significant effects that brief but extreme climatic events (ECE) can have on a variety of ecological processes, including species interactions, physiology, and the phenological timing of biological events. We suggest that a key piece missing from our understanding of the ecological consequences of ECEs, and our ability to predict them, is the role of timing. We present evidence from a range of subfields of ecology indicating that brief extreme conditions have differing and potentially contrasting effects depending on when they occur relative to the timing of biological processes at organismal, population, community, and ecosystem scales.

Results/Conclusions

We demonstrate how an understanding of the timing of biological processes in a given system leads to predictions of the consequences of single ECEs as well as new hypotheses about when systems are most vulnerable to ECEs. Considering the importance of the timing of extreme climatic events brings a new understanding of previous and future research, where the effects of an ECE will change depending on when the ECE happens along the temporal trajectory of biological processes at different scales.