LTREB: Drivers and consequences of phenological change at high altitudes

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).This Long-Term Research in Environmental Biology project capitalizes on 35 years of existing data to investigate how climate change is affecting the phenology (timing) and abundance of flowering by nearly 100 species of alpine wildflowers. Researchers from Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and New Hampshire will collaborate to continue this long-term study in mountain meadows in Colorado. They propose to combine insights from their historical data with new observations and experiments to learn how environmental variables affect timing and abundance of flowering. In addition to this community-level approach they will also track individual plants to test whether the relationship between flowering phenology and snowmelt is changing over time. They will record the phenology of pollinators such as bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds, and will collaborate with other researchers studying aquatic insects, burying beetles, birds, and mosquitoes to create an unparalleled dataset showing the phenological relationships among taxonomic groups and trophic levels and how they are shifting in a changing climate.This project will foster a new collaboration by senior and junior personnel, support research assistants (including undergraduates, graduate students, and a community college teacher) and postdoctoral researchers, and continue what is becoming one of the longest, continuous-running sets of phenological observations in North America. This work will substantially improve our understanding of the long-term ecological and evolutionary responses of populations and communities to climate change.