My research focuses on how phenological shifts associated with climate change alter species interactions. In particular, I am interested in how shifts in flowering time affect plant-pollinator interactions. Many plants are flowering earlier as a result of climate change, and there is currently much concern that these phenological shifts will lead to temporal mismatches between plants and pollinators.
I use a combination of long-term phenological data, experimental manipulations of plant phenology, and observations of natural variation in phenology to understand how plant-pollinator interactions are likely to be affected by climate change.
I address three main questions in my research:
- How do temporal shifts, alone and in combination with spatial shifts, affect interactions?
- How do mutualist effectiveness and reproduction depend on phenology?
- What traits predispose species to shift and lead interacting species to develop mismatches?
My primary field sites have been Curtis Prairie in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson, Arizona, and subalpine meadows around the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Colorado.
