Niche breadth changes in response to environmental perturbation: the impact of early snowmelt on subalpine plant-pollinator specialization

Abstract

With global climate change, we observe phenological changes across all ecosystems. In the Colorado Rocky Mountains, warming is resulting in lower snowpack and earlier spring melt. Since plants use snow melt timing as a cue to start growing, climate change is implicated in accelerated bloom time and thus has the potential to cause a phenological mismatch between plants and their pollinators. To account for this mismatch, pollinators may change the plant species they interact with (i.e. their niche breadth) to account for the difference in timing of floral resources. This could include wholescale switching to a new resource, changing the number of species they visit, or instead could change the frequency of their visits to different plants. In this study, we investigated the impact of an environmental perturbation on plant-pollinator niche breadth, focusing on if and how niche breadth changes. We perturbed the system by inducing a phenological change by manipulating the timing of snowmelt which in turn accelerated bloom time by approximately two weeks. Our study thus tested for a phenological mismatch between plants and pollinators. Under this manipulation, in accelerated-snowmelt plots, we found that pollinators foraged on more diverse plants while maintaining the number of plant species they visited. We expect pollinators to expand their niche breadth in order to receive enough floral resources. In changing their own niche breadth, pollinators also broaden plant niche breadth. Consequently, we expect both plants and pollinators to face uncertainties and challenges due to phenological change.

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