How does climate change affect pollination phenology?

What is climate change doing to plant–pollinator interactions? In the last decade, ecologists have focused on the possibility that climate change will shift the seasonal timing (phenology) of plants relative to their pollinators, reducing temporal overlap between interdependent species. In the Early View paper "Plant–pollinator interactions and phenological change: what can we learn about climate impacts from experiments and observations?" in Oikos , I evaluate the evidence that plant–pollinator overlap is changing as a result of climate change, and that such changes affect population persistence. I also discuss the strengths and limitations of different types of evidence for climate-change impacts. In particular, I explore the challenge of interpreting “temporal transplant” experiments, which manipulate the phenology of a subset of plants or pollinators in isolation, creating subpopulations of mistimed individuals in a matrix of unaltered phenology.

Observational data have shown us that, for the most part, plant and pollinator phenologies are advancing in parallel in response to warmer temperatures. While there are cases of plants blooming before their pollinators are active and consequently setting few seeds, there is no conclusive evidence yet that climate change is causing this “mismatch” to happen more often. There’s even less indication that pollinators are suffering from mismatch with plants—but pollinator fitness has received much less study. I suggest that there is much still to be learned about the direct effects of climate change (e.g., snowpack reductions, temperature extremes and fluctuations) on populations of pollinators and pollinator-dependent plants—effects that might be more demographically consequential than non-parallel shifts in phenology.

By Jessica R.K. Forrest