A global synthesis of animal phenological responses to climate change

By Jeremy M. Cohen, M. Lajeunesse, Jason Rohr. Nature Climate Change, 2018

435 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Shifts in phenology are already resulting in disruptions to the timing of migration and breeding, and asynchronies between interacting species1–5. Recent syntheses have concluded that trophic level1, latitude6 and how phenological responses are measured7 are key to determining the strength of phenological responses to climate change. However, researchers still lack a comprehensive framework that can predict responses to climate change globally and across diverse taxa. Here, we synthesize hundreds of published time series of animal phenology from across the planet to show that temperature primarily drives phenological responses at mid-latitudes, with precipitation becoming important at lower latitudes, probably reflecting factors that drive seasonality in each region. Phylogeny and body size are associated with the strength of phenological shifts, suggesting emerging asynchronies between interacting species that differ in body size, such as hosts and parasites and predators and prey. Finally, although there are many compelling biological explanations for spring phenological delays, some examples of delays are associated with short annual records that are prone to sampling error. Our findings arm biologists with predictions concerning which climatic variables and organismal traits drive phenological shifts.A synthesis of animal phenology shows that temperature primarily drives mid-latitude responses, with precipitation important at lower latitudes. Phylogeny and body size are associated with the strength of phenological shifts.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0043f536eb1631be111bd786573354e6d169ea79

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Citations in the corpus

Terrestrial insects and climate change: adaptive responses in key traits (2019, background): “Extinction events have been related to drought events in the checkerspot butterfly (McLaughlin et al., 2002), whereas Cohen et al. (2018) found precipitation to be equally as important as temperature with respect to predicting phenology at lower latitudes.”
Complex responses of global insect pests to climate warming (2020, background): “could increase interactions between pests in annual agricultural habitats and surrounding ecosystems (Singer and Parmesan 2010; Cohen et al. 2018), thereby increasing the ecological impacts of these pests.”
Thermal Plasticity in Insects’ Response to Climate Change and to Multifactorial Environments (2020, background): “Climate change-related temperature variation has been implicated in altered phenology, distribution range, and population abundance of many insect species around the world (Parmesan, 2006; Buckley et al., 2017; Cohen et al., 2018; Macgregor et al., 2019).”
Insect responses to global change offer signposts for biodiversity and conservation (2020, background): “At mid-latitudes and above, temperature appears to be the main driver of phenology (Cohen et al., 2018) and has led to geographically and taxonomically widespread advances in dates of spring insect emergence and peak abundance (Forrest, 2016; Bell et al., 2019).”
Interpreting insect declines: seven challenges and a way forward (2020, background): “…in population-level inference is that sample abundances might falsely indicate a decline in population size through time because of a progressive phenological shift in insect activity in response to changing climate, or other environmental factors (Parmesan & Yohe, 2003; Cohen et al., 2018).”