Taking a chance in unseasonal environments

Climate change has been shifting seasonal time, with spring now thought to occur more than eight days earlier in the UK. Scientists working in the field of phenology, which studies the lifecycle timing of plants and animals, have been exploring what these changes mean for how ecosystems work. What happens when birds hatch their eggs too early for peaks in their food populations? How are plants coping with the more unpredictable weather? This contribution will explore the messy changes that are happening to the seasonal calendars of plants and animals. Throughout we will see it is not only the calendars of human communities that are getting out of synch due to climate change, with the cues and seasonal indicators that plants and animals rely on to know when to do things may also be leading many of them astray.