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

据报道，近几十年来，许多典型的春季指标，如鸟类产卵和植物开花的时间一直在变化。与几十年前相比，现在许多重复发生的生物事件发生得更早了。这被认为是气候变化最显著的生物影响之一。这些变化远非微不足道，它们可能会破坏物种之间的季节性关系。这是因为不同的物种在不同程度上改变了它们的季节时间。例如，像一些林地鸟类这样的捕食者现在可能需要在一年中昆虫食物的高峰不再出现的时候喂养它们的雏鸟，而这些事件可能曾经是重合的。不同物种季节同步的这种变化有可能影响后代的数量和种群的生存。一些针对少数物种的研究表明，捕食者和猎物可能会变得不同步，因为它们对气候变暖有不同的反应，但我们目前还不知道这是否是一种普遍的模式，适用于大量物种。我们目前也不知道，已观测到的春季事件发生时间的变化，在多大程度上受到了人为引起的气候变化的影响，而不是由自然原因引起的气候变化。目前的项目旨在通过分析英国数百种植物和动物物种的数千项长期研究，并显示掠食性物种对气候变化的平均反应是否与猎物不同，以及这些变化是否可能是人类引起的气候变化的影响，从而解决我们知识中的这些空白。我们还旨在建立英国的地区和栖息地，在这些地区，通过关注鸟类和它们喂养雏鸟的昆虫，捕食者和猎物最有可能不同步。这是第一次对来自海洋、淡水和旱地环境的如此之多的物种进行分析，从而可以对它们进行有意义的比较，并且可以对人类引起的变暖对英国广泛生态系统功能的可能意义发表声明。

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.