Quantifying links between human influences on climate, shifting seasons and widespread ecosystem consequences

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It has been reported that the time-of-year of many typical indicators of spring, such as egg laying in birds and flowering in plants, has been changing in recent decades. Many of these recurring biological events now happen earlier in the year than they did just a few decades ago. This is believed to be one of the most conspicuous biological impacts of climate change. Far from trivial, these changes could disrupt seasonal relationships between species. This is because different species have changed their seasonal timing to different extents. For example, predators such as some woodland birds may now need to feed their chicks at a time of year at which peaks in their insect food no longer occur, whereas these events may once have coincided. Such changes in the seasonal synchronisation of different species have the potential affect numbers of offspring produced and the survival of populations. A few studies on a small number of species suggest that predators and prey may become de-synchronised because they have different responses to a warming climate but we do not currently know whether this is a general pattern that holds across a large number of species. We also do not currently know how much the observed changes in the timing of spring events has been affected by human-induced climate change, rather than climate change brought about by natural causes. The current project aims to address these gaps in our knowledge by analysing thousands of long-term studies on hundreds of UK plant and animal species and showing whether predatory species have, on average, different responses to climate change compared to their prey and whether these changes are likely to be effects of the human-induced component of climate change. We also aim to establish the regions of the UK, and habitats, in which possible de-synchronisation between predators and prey is most likely by focussing on birds and the insects on which they feed their chicks. This is the first time that so many species from marine, freshwater and dry-land environments have been analysed in a way that allows meaningful comparisons to be made between them, and that allows a statement to be made about the likely significance of human-induced warming for the functioning of a wide range of UK ecosystems.