ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Phenological shifts conserve thermal niches in North American birds and reshape expectations for climate-driven range shifts.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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43 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Adaptive responses of animals to climate change are most likely insufficient.Nature communications · 2019Pooled it
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- Human and Hunting Dog Interactions in the United States: Exploring Potential Transmission Pathways of Zoonotic Diseases and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Virus.Veterinary sciences · 2026Article
- Phenological plasticity enables thermal homeostasis in a wild bird population.Science advances · 2026Article
- Passive Acoustic Data as Phenological Distributions: Uncovering Signals of Temporal Ecology.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Article
- Shifting Seasons: Long-Term Insights Into Climate Change Effects on Bird Phenology From Ringing Data.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Pacific Northwest birds have shifted their abundances upslope in response to 30 years of warming temperatures.Ecology · 2025Article
- Poleward Range Shifts of Breeding Birds in Wisconsin.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Potential for bird-insect phenological mismatch in a tri-trophic system.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Advances in breeding phenology outpace latitudinal and elevational shifts for North American birds tracking temperature.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- New citizen science initiative enhances flowering onset predictions for fruit trees in Great Britain.Horticulture research · 2024Article
- Recent range shifts of moths, butterflies, and birds are driven by the breadth of their climatic niche.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Macroecological predictors of evolutionary and plastic potential do not apply at microgeographic scales for a freshwater cladoceran under climate change.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Arctos: Community-driven innovations for managing natural and cultural history collections.PloS one · 2024Article
- Migratory herbivorous waterfowl track multiple resource waves during spring migration.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Effects of Multiple Environmental Stressors on Zoobenthos Communities in Shallow Lakes: Evidence from a Mesocosm Experiment.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Inconsistent shifts in warming and temperature variability are linked to reduced avian fitness.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Demographic consequences of phenological asynchrony for North American songbirds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Abrupt expansion of climate change risks for species globally.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Species respond to climate change in two dominant ways: range shifts in latitude or elevation and phenological shifts of life-history events. Range shifts are widely viewed as the principal mechanism for thermal niche tracking, and phenological shifts in birds and other consumers are widely understood as the principal mechanism for tracking temporal peaks in biotic resources. However, phenological and range shifts each present simultaneous opportunities for temperature and resource tracking, although the possible role for phenological shifts in thermal niche tracking has been widely overlooked. Using a canonical dataset of Californian bird surveys and a detectability-based approach for quantifying phenological signal, we show that Californian bird communities advanced their breeding phenology by 5-12 d over the last century. This phenological shift might track shifting resource peaks, but it also reduces average temperatures during nesting by over 1 °C, approximately the same magnitude that average temperatures have warmed over the same period. We further show that early-summer temperature anomalies are correlated with nest success in a continental-scale database of bird nests, suggesting avian thermal niches might be broadly limited by temperatures during nesting. These findings outline an adaptation surface where geographic range and breeding phenology respond jointly to constraints imposed by temperature and resource phenology. By stabilizing temperatures during nesting, phenological shifts might mitigate the need for range shifts. Global change ecology will benefit from further exploring phenological adjustment as a potential mechanism for thermal niche tracking and vice versa.
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