LTREB: Drivers and consequences of phenological change at high altitudes

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。这个环境生物学长期研究项目利用35年的现有数据，调查气候变化如何影响近100种高山野花的物候（时间）和开花数量。来自亚利桑那州、科罗拉多州、马里兰州和新罕布什尔州的研究人员将合作在科罗拉多州的山区草地上继续这项长期研究。他们建议将历史数据的见解与新的观察和实验相结合，以了解环境变量如何影响开花的时间和丰富程度。除了这种社区水平的方法，他们还将跟踪单个植物，以测试开花物候和融雪之间的关系是否随着时间的推移而变化。他们将记录传粉媒介的物候，如蜜蜂、蝴蝶和蜂鸟，并将与其他研究水生昆虫、埋葬甲虫、鸟类和蚊子的研究人员合作，创建一个无与伦比的数据集，显示分类群体和营养水平之间的物候关系，以及它们如何在不断变化的气候中变化。该项目将促进高级和初级人员之间的新合作，支持研究助理（包括本科生，研究生和社区大学教师）和博士后研究人员，并继续成为北美最长，连续运行的物候观测集之一。这项工作将大大提高我们对人口和社区对气候变化的长期生态和进化反应的理解。

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.