Climate change is likely to alter both flowering phenology and water availability for plants. Either of these changes alone can affect pollinator visitation and plant reproductive success. The relative impacts of phenology and water, and whether they interact in their impacts on plant reproductive s

Interactions between a native plant species and its pollinators, herbivores, or microbiome can be affected by the presence of non-native plant species. Non-native plant species are altering plant-pollinator interactions, yet we know little about how these non-native species influence natural selecti

Organismal traits often influence fitness via interactions with multiple species. That selection is not necessarily predictable from pairwise interactions, such as when interactions occur during different lifecycle stages. Theoretically, directional selection during two sequential episodes, e.g., po

Premise of the Study – Flowering time may influence pollination success and seed set through a variety of mechanisms, including seasonal changes in total pollinator visitation or the composition and effectiveness of pollinator visitors. Methods – We investigated mechanisms by which changes in flower

Altered precipitation patterns associated with anthropogenic climate change are expected to have many effects on plants and insect pollinators, but it is unknown if effects on pollination are mediated by changes in water availability. We tested the hypothesis that impacts of climate on plant pollina

Data come from fourteen sites in the West Elk Mountains of Colorado, USA. The study aimed to identify the factors regulating phenology of plants and cavity-nesting insects, and to determine the likelihood of asynchrony between flowering and pollinator emergence under climate change. Numbers of flowe

Prof. Rebecca (Becky) Irwin has been collecting data on the abundance and timing of bees in permanent sites near the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab (RMBL), Gothic, Colorado, USA, from 2009 to present. During the flight season, we use pan traps and netting every two weeks to estimate bee abundance by