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ViewAttendees 16

SysEB

Student Competition 10-Minute Paper

Grad 10-min: SysEB, Climate Change and Biogeography

Interactions among climate, urbanization, and life-history traits determine the timing of adult insect activity across broad spatial and taxonomic scales

On-Demand
Student Competition On-Demand
Changes in the timing of life-history events are among the most visible ecological impacts of  climate change. Additionally, urbanization can influence phenology through a variety of mechanisms including the urban heat island effect. Insects are an ideal group for studying the impacts of global change on phenology due to their vast diversity, temperature-dependent development, and importance in ecological interactions. In general, previous studies have found that insects emerge as adults earlier in response to both warmer temperatures and urbanization. However, considerably less is known about how climate and urbanization impact the termination of adult insect activity, a critical metric for studying phenological mismatch. We assembled a data set of 336,172 occurrence records from 2015 to 2019 for 113 insect species across North America. We used these records to estimate three phenometrics: onset, offset, and duration of adult insect activity, and we used phylogenetic linear mixed models to examine the effects of climate, life-history traits, and urbanization on each phenometric. Life-history traits and the interactions between life-history traits and temperature were important predictors in our models for all three phenometrics. Our results demonstrate the importance of including life history traits and their interactions with climate variables when predicting how insect phenology will shift in response to global change and highlights the need for continued efforts to make insect trait data FAIR. Comparison of our results to plant phenology studies show that insects may be responding differently to the interaction between urbanization and temperature, suggesting the potential for phenological asynchrony.