OPUS: CRS: The impacts of changing phenology on species, ecological interactions, and conservation

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Environmental change is altering the timing of seasonal events, such as when plants flower or leaf in the spring or when leaf colors change or birds migrate in the fall. These changes are altering relationships between species—such as between plants and pollinators, and between birds and insects that they eat—and are influencing techniques conservation managers use to protect species. This project will synthesize insights from 17 years of research on plant and animal responses to environmental change, and an additional 30 years of research on plant population and community ecology by the Primack Lab at Boston University. The synthesis will address key questions in ecology and conservation, such as how different species, locations, and seasonal events are responding to changes in climate and how these changes might affect methods that conservation managers use to protect natural resources. The synthesis work will include observations of plant flowering and leafing and bird migrations made by Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s in Concord, Massachusetts and flowering and other seasonal events at dozens of sites in Japan and South Korea, across eight botanical gardens on three continents, and at two US national parks. The researchers will communicate the results of this project widely through scientific and public presentations, media interviews, and interactions with conservation managers. The researchers will also engage high school teachers and citizen scientists in activities related to this research. This project will result in four synthesis papers that will explore and describe: (1) variation in plant phenological responses to environmental change and potential disruptions in ecological relationships; (2) the role of botanical gardens in advancing environmental change research; (3) best practices for standardizing, evaluating, and analyzing phenological resources to understand ecological responses to environmental change; and (4) techniques and hypotheses for incorporating plant responses to environmental change into conservation and protected area management. The project will also make key data sets and metadata associated with this project publicly available in long-term, searchable data archives. These data sets—which cover long periods of time, dozens of species, and numerous field sites—will allow other researchers to carry out further analyses exploring species responses to environmental change and will provide a resource for initiatives aimed at teaching data-driven ecology and statistics to high school students and undergraduates.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.