Climate-driven plant-pollinator timing mismatches: does biodiversity provide backup?

Pollination is essential for plant reproduction, biodiversity, and agriculture. Scientists are increasingly worried about timing mismatches between plants and their pollinators, driven by climate change. Plants and insects use different environmental cues (temperature, day length, snowmelt) to time when they bloom and when they become active, and climate change is increasingly causing these cues to fall out of sync.

Most research on this problem has focused on individual plants in isolation, which tend to show negative effects from mistimed pollination. But in nature, most plants are visited by multiple pollinator species and vice versa—so could that biodiversity act as a buffer against these mismatches?

To find out, we conducted a study in the Colorado Rockies, where snowmelt largely controls when plants bloom. We experimentally manipulated snowmelt in large plots containing multiple plant species and many individuals of each. Come to the talk to find out what we discovered about how…