Tue, Aug 16, 2022: 2:15 PM-2:30 PM
518A
Background/Question/MethodsUnderstanding 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/ConclusionsOur 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.
Results/ConclusionsOur 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.