Climate change is scrambling the seasonal timing of oak budburst, caterpillar hatching, and bird breeding—and this project will track that disruption across entire landscapes, not just single locations. Most research on phenological mismatch has focused on whether species at different levels of a food chain stay in sync at a single site. This ignores a critical question: does synchrony break down differently across space, and does that spatial variation matter for evolution and ecosystem stability? The project uses a classic three-species system—oak trees, winter moth caterpillars, and great tits—backed by decades of field data and tens of thousands of historical records. The team will develop automated methods to measure phenology at landscape scale, and design new experiments to test how mismatch drives local adaptation. They will also test whether greater spatial variation in tree phenology supports higher consumer diversity and productivity, and whether birds’ behavioural flexibility helps them exploit a patchy seasonal landscape. This is fundamental science. It will not produce a new technology or policy tool next year. But understanding how species adapt to shifting seasonal rhythms across space could eventually inform conservation planning, forest management, and predictions of how ecosystems will respond to continued climate change.
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Changes in the timing of seasonal events (phenology) provide the strongest and clearest evidence for effects of human-caused climate change on biotic systems. Our understanding of the importance of these changes has been dominated by the idea that the disruption of temporal synchrony between different trophic levels is a key determinant of their impact. However, previous work has largely ignored the crucial question of the spatial scale of synchrony and how this underpins the fundamental biological processes that would mediate any effect. This proposal addresses the missing perspective of spatial scale in phenological synchrony, using a classic model system for understanding changes in phenology in relation to climatic variation. Using the tri-trophic system of deciduous trees, phytophagous insects and predatory birds (exemplified by oak-winter moth-great tit), the work will be centred on a long-term study system, providing decades of data and tens of thousands of historical records which place the work on secure foundations. Using this platform, the work described here will (i) develop new automated methods for effective measurement of phenology at scale, and (ii) new experimental methods for dissecting the ecological and evolutionary effects of phenological mismatch. It will further, (iii) test experimentally the role of phenological variation in space and time in driving local adaptation; (iv) test the hypothesis that consumer diversity and productivity is higher when spatial variation in producer phenology is higher, (v) elucidate how behavioural flexibility of consumers enables optimal exploitation of phenological landscapes and (vi) determine how scale-dependent phenological variation can buffer against climatic variation. The new methods and perspectives developed here will expand our understanding of the biological importance of phenological variation while simultaneously relating this new understanding to ongoing global change.
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