This is a guest post by Emma Goodwin, a UNE honours student I’m co-supervising with Romina Rader and Francisco Encinas-Viso at CSIRO. Emma spent a few weeks over summer in Kosciuszko National Park, catching pollinators and collecting data on alpine plant-pollinator networks, and is currently writing up her exciting results! This blog is co-posted over at the Rader Lab website.

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Recent plant-pollinator network studies have been concerned with the impacts that climate change may have on pollination across various ecosystems, particularly in alpine regions. Many of these studies are investigating ‘phenological mismatch’ as a significant issue that may result from climate change.

‘Phenological mismatch’ or ‘phenological asynchrony’ is used to refer to when the emergence of pollinators and flowering time of plants becomes out of sync over time. If these two processes become out of sync then it reduces the potential for flowering plants to be pollinated. Continue reading →