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Strengthening the evidence base for temperature-mediated phenological asynchrony and its impacts

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 5, pages 155–164 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Climate warming has caused the seasonal timing of many components of ecological food chains to advance. In the context of trophic interactions, the match–mismatch hypothesis postulates that differential shifts can lead to phenological asynchrony with negative impacts for consumers. However, at present there has been no consistent analysis of the links between temperature change, phenological asynchrony and individual-to-population-level impacts across taxa, trophic levels and biomes at a global scale. Here, we propose five criteria that all need to be met to demonstrate that temperature-mediated trophic asynchrony poses a growing risk to consumers. We conduct a literature review of 109 papers studying 129 taxa, and find that all five criteria are assessed for only two taxa, with the majority of taxa only having one or two criteria assessed. Crucially, nearly every study was conducted in Europe or North America, and most studies were on terrestrial secondary consumers. We thus lack a robust evidence base from which to draw general conclusions about the risk that climate-mediated trophic asynchrony may pose to populations worldwide.

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Fig. 1: Locations of studies on phenological asynchrony identified by our analysis.
Fig. 2: Testing the five criteria.
Fig. 3: Consumer versus resource slopes in relation to year and temperature.
Fig. 4: Consequences of trophic asynchrony per taxon.

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Data availability

All data files related to this review are available at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/c8xzd/.

Code availability

All R code to generate the results in this paper can be combined with the data files, and are available at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/c8xzd/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Husby, T. Reed, M. Visser, I. Myers-Smith and M. Singer for constructive criticism on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Evolutionary Biology, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Jelmer M. Samplonius, Katharine Keogan, Kirsty H. Macphie, Jamie C. Weir & Albert B. Phillimore

  2. Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Plymouth, UK

    Angus Atkinson

  3. School of Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Christopher Hassall

  4. Marine Scotland Science, Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen, UK

    Katharine Keogan

  5. Lake Ecosystems Group, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Lancaster, UK

    Stephen J. Thackeray

  6. Department of Biology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Jakob J. Assmann

  7. RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, Sandy, UK

    Malcolm D. Burgess

  8. Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Malcolm D. Burgess

  9. Department of Biology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Jacob Johansson

  10. British Trust for Ornithology, Thetford, UK

    James W. Pearce-Higgins

  11. Conservation Science Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    James W. Pearce-Higgins

  12. Department of Mathematical Sciences and Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway

    Emily G. Simmonds

  13. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Øystein Varpe

  14. Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Bergen, Norway

    Øystein Varpe

  15. Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Dylan Z. Childs

  16. Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Ella F. Cole, Tom Hart, Owen T. Lewis & Ben C. Sheldon

  17. UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Penicuik, UK

    Francis Daunt

  18. Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, UK

    Nathalie Pettorelli

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  1. Jelmer M. Samplonius
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Contributions

All authors contributed to conceiving ideas and editing the manuscript. J.M.S., A.B.P., A.A., C.H., K.K., S.J.T., J.J.A., M.D.B., J.J., K.H.M., J.W.P.-H., E.G.S., Ø.V. and J.C.W. extracted data for the analyses. J.M.S., A.B.P., A.A., C.H., K.K. and S.J.T. contributed to writing the manuscript. J.M.S. and A.B.P. expanded on the initial ideas to determine the structure and content of the manuscript and wrote most of it. J.M.S. conducted the analyses.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jelmer M. Samplonius.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Records returned from literature search.

Total publications by year and sum of times cited for the studies captured by our search terms.

Extended Data Fig. 2 PRISMA flowchart for records included and excluded.

Flow chart of the number of papers screened, and those included and excluded using three filters. This process resulted in 109 relevant papers, which provided information on 132 taxa.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Criteria per study.

Overview of all the study-by-taxon combinations identified (200 in 109 papers), showing which (and how many) criteria were studied in individual papers.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods and Table 1.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data 1

Contains three tabs with spreadsheets that are read by the R script and used for the analyses.

Supplementary Data 2

R script to reproduce the analyses for this article.

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Samplonius, J.M., Atkinson, A., Hassall, C. et al. Strengthening the evidence base for temperature-mediated phenological asynchrony and its impacts. Nat Ecol Evol 5, 155–164 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01357-0

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