By Deidre Jaeger When spring comes early once, some plants and animals may have a tough year. When spring comes early a lot, time-sensitive relationships such as breeding or migration may lead to long-term changes in populations. A phenological mismatch can occur when activity periods of two types of organisms no longer overlap, such as plants and their pollinators, or predators and their prey. Typically, organisms with small bodies, large population sizes, more genetic variation, and short reproductive cycles can better adapt to changing climate (e.g. plants and insects). Climate change may outpace an animal’s ability to evolve if it’s in a group with low genetic variation or small population sizes with long generation times (like birds and mammals). Some European great tits (Parus major) can adjust to lay eggs earlier in the spring to match up with caterpillars that hatch sooner due to an early spring. These “early” birds have greater survival than birds with less flexible egg laying. For other European great tits that cannot adjust hatching, chicks can miss feeding on their larval prey before the caterpillars mature to butterflies and moths, a mismatch which is being amplified with climate change (Nussey et al. 2005; Bradshaw and Holzapfel, 2006). This research is from a 40-year study in the Netherlands, indicating it can take a long time to observe these kinds of changes in animals with infrequent reproduction. It is important to gather information about the timing of seasonal events over long periods to understand how climate change can influence evolutionary changes in the natural environment. When spring comes early in Colorado, it can be problematic or beneficial depending on the species. Some plant species start growing leaves or flower buds in response to the warmer temperatures but early budding can leave plants susceptible to freezing. Research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte has found that advancing spring temperatures and early snow melt is correlated with earlier bloom times but lower seed production in some plants that get damaged by frost (Inouye 2008). You may have seen yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris), the largest member of the squirrel family, if you like to hike in Rocky Mountain National Park. Yellow-bellied marmots typically build high fat stores in their body to hibernate through the harsh winter. Recent research shows that the longer growing seasons experienced in Colorado is correlated with higher winter survival rates and reproduction of this marmot, as well as higher body mass likely due to more awake time to forage for food (Ozgul et al., 2010)! If you want to track how plants and animals may be responding to a changing climate, consider becoming a volunteer reporter for Nature’s Notebook [usanpn.org/natures_notebook]. You report can report any observations of animals, leaves, or flowers from your backyard or a local park. Researchers use these observations to assess large scale climate response trends across the United States, or researchers like me may use them to look at how the timing of plant activity is responding to climate change within urban environments along the Front Range. The effects of changing climate and seasonal shifts will be different for many species. How have your activities changed when spring comes early? Yellow-bellied marmot may not hibernate as long in Rocky Mountain National Park, courtesy of Walt Kaesler, National Park Service European great tits chicks don’t always hatch in time to eat caterpillars before they change from larvae to butterflies or moths. Spring has come up to 20 days early in parts of eastern Colorado including the Denver area.
Bradshaw, W. Holzapfel, C. 2006. Evolutionary response to rapid climate change. Science. 312 (5779), 1477-1478. Inouye, D. 2008. Effects of climate change on phenology, frost damage, and floral abundance on montane wildflowers. Ecology. 89, 3535-362. Nussey, D., Postma, E., Gienapp, P., Visser, M. 2005. Selection on Heritable phenotypic plasticity in a wild bird population. Science. 1116569. Ozgul, A., Childs, D., Oli, M., Armitage, K., Blumstein, D., Olsen, L., Tuljapurkar, S., Coulsen, T. 2010. Coupled dynamics of body mass and population growth in response to environmental change. Nature. 466 (7305); 482-485.
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Hello! I’m Cliff Bueno de Mesquita, a PhD Candidate in Katie Suding’s Lab. Our lab group works on how global change is affecting plant communities in a variety of ecosystems including California grasslands and alpine tundra. I have been working on how climate change is affecting alpine plant communities right in our back yard – in the Colorado Front Range. We have an interesting experiment ongoing at the Niwot Ridge Long Term Ecological Research Site, near Nederland, CO. This site, run by CU, has some of the best long term climate data in the world! These data were recently analyzed by T. Kittel (unpublished), and show a warming trend, especially in the spring and summer, in the Colorado Front Range subalpine and alpine environments. Note that even small changes in temperature can have enormous impacts on organisms! Results of the ITEX experiments have been published in several different peer reviewed journal articles, but papers by Walker et al. (2006) and Elmendorf et al. (2012) combined and analyzed data from all of the sites. Some key findings of the ITEX experiment are increases in shrubs and grasses, declines in moss and lichen, and declines in plant diversity. These results suggest that in the future, warmed tundra could look vastly different than they do today! It is possible that hiking in the high elevation areas of Colorado could take you through shrubby grasslands instead of meadows of alpine wildflowers. This result also highlights an effect of climate change seen in many ecosystems – that some species like the warmer climate and increase their populations at the expense of other species, thus leading to a loss of biodiversity. References: Elmendorf, S. C., Henry, G. H. R., Hollister, R. D., Björk, R. G., Boulanger-Lapointe, N., Cooper, E. J., … Wipf, S. (2012). Plot-scale evidence of tundra vegetation change and links to recent summer warming. Nature Climate Change, 2(6), 453–457. http://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1465 Kittel, T.G.F. Analysis of Niwot Ridge Climate Data. Unpublished. Walker, M. D., Wahren, C. H., Hollister, R. D., Henry, G. H. R., Ahlquist, L. E., Alatalo, J. M., … Wookey, P. A. (2006). Plant community responses to experimental warming across the tundra biome. PNAS, 103(5), 1342–6. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0503198103 Hey there, and welcome to our first blog post! My name is Chiara Forrester and I’m a first year PhD student in Dr. William Bowman’s lab. Most folks in our lab study plant communities and nitrogen cycling in the alpine. For my dissertation, I’m broadly interested in how climate change will affect alpine plant communities. One of the changes occurring in mountain environments due to climate change is less snowfall and early snowmelt. In addition to ecological concerns, this symptom of a warming climate is garnering a lot of attention from the outdoor recreation industry, which is extremely important in Colorado’s economy (check out Protect Our Winters, or POW). If you’re interested in how this issue might affect the economy, check out these impacts that the Protect Our Winters organization has put together: Climate warming is causing a trend toward less snowfall, and earlier spring snowmelt. Snowpack is awesome for building snow people and having snowball fights, but is also very important in alpine ecology. It impacts nutrient cycling, plant diversity and time of flowering, the water cycle and even tropospheric air temperatures. If you love snow sports, this means a shorter season. If you’re a plant (good job reading this!) you might flower earlier, which could affect your species’ population or other species you live next to. It could also mean you have to deal with soils that are dry for longer without as long of an insulation period under the snow, causing more competition within and between different species. Warming is especially affecting mountain ecosystems because of the large changes that happen across small distances, such as the types of species that live in a given place and the environmental characteristics (such as soil moisture) specific to that area. In order to understand what impacts altered snow dynamics might have on our environment, we need to continue to ask questions! Conducting research can allow us to use our findings to make targeted management/conservation plans to lessen any negative impacts. I’m working toward doing research on how plant species and their fungal partners will be affected by early snowmelt. I want to know not just how plant diversity and the types of species living in a given place might change, but also how their interactions with fungi might change. If earlier snowmelt is stressful for plants, I’m wondering if plants will recruit more fungal friends to help them access nutrients and deal with drought. Here’s a fun podcast by RadioLab on relationships between plants and fungi.
Once I start fieldwork I’ll post some (hopefully rad) pictures of our experimental design, but until then feel free to ask any questions you might have! |
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