Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona, 85721 ; Center for Insect Science, University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona, 85721.
Ecol Evol. 2013 Sep;3(9):3183-93. doi: 10.1002/ece3.668. Epub 2013 Jul 22.
Concern regarding the biological effects of climate change has led to a recent surge in research to understand the consequences of phenological change for species interactions. This rapidly expanding research program is centered on three lines of inquiry: (1) how the phenological overlap of interacting species is changing, (2) why the phenological overlap of interacting species is changing, and (3) how the phenological overlap of interacting species will change under future climate scenarios. We synthesize the widely disparate approaches currently being used to investigate these questions: (1) interpretation of long-term phenological data, (2) field observations, (3) experimental manipulations, (4) simulations and nonmechanistic models, and (5) mechanistic models. We present a conceptual framework for selecting approaches that are best matched to the question of interest. We weigh the merits and limitations of each approach, survey the recent literature from diverse systems to quantify their use, and characterize the types of interactions being studied by each of them. We highlight the value of combining approaches and the importance of long-term data for establishing a baseline of phenological synchrony. Future work that scales up from pairwise species interactions to communities and ecosystems, emphasizing the use of predictive approaches, will be particularly valuable for reaching a broader understanding of the complex effects of climate change on the phenological overlap of interacting species. It will also be important to study a broader range of interactions: to date, most of the research on climate-induced phenological shifts has focused on terrestrial pairwise resource-consumer interactions, especially those between plants and insects.
对气候变化的生物学影响的关注导致了最近对理解物候变化对物种相互作用的后果的研究激增。这个迅速扩展的研究计划集中在三个探究方向：（1）相互作用的物种的物候重叠如何变化，（2）相互作用的物种的物候重叠为什么会变化，以及（3）相互作用的物种的物候重叠在未来气候情景下将如何变化。我们综合了目前用于研究这些问题的广泛不同的方法：（1）对长期物候数据的解释，（2）实地观测，（3）实验操作，（4）模拟和非机制模型，以及（5）机制模型。我们提出了一个选择最适合感兴趣问题的方法的概念框架。我们权衡了每种方法的优点和局限性，调查了来自不同系统的最新文献以量化它们的使用情况，并描述了每种方法研究的相互作用类型。我们强调了结合方法的价值以及长期数据对于建立物候同步的基线的重要性。从物种相互作用扩展到群落和生态系统的、强调使用预测方法的未来工作，对于更广泛地理解气候变化对相互作用的物种的物候重叠的复杂影响将特别有价值。研究更广泛的相互作用也很重要：迄今为止，关于气候引起的物候变化的大多数研究都集中在陆地的成对资源-消费者相互作用上，特别是在植物和昆虫之间。
