Will climate change uncouple trophic links through shifts in timing?

Determine whether warming is pulling interacting species out of step in their seasonal timing, and whether the mismatch harms populations.

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1	# Will climate change uncouple trophic links through shifts in timing?
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3	Warming is moving the calendar of spring: leaves open, insects emerge and birds breed earlier. If consumers and their food shift by different amounts they can fall out of step, a phenological mismatch that could ripple through food webs.
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5	## Question
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7	To what extent will climate change uncouple trophic links, between plants and herbivores, prey and predators, flowers and pollinators, or hosts and parasites, because interacting species shift the timing of their life cycles (their phenology) by different amounts? This means both whether timing diverges and whether the divergence harms populations.
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9	## Background
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11	This is one of 100 fundamental ecological questions drawn up for the British Ecological Society's centenary from 754 questions submitted by 388 participants. It sits in the theme on human impacts and global change, among questions on how communities of interacting species respond to change [1].
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13	## What is known
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15	- Across 10,003 terrestrial and aquatic phenological data sets, secondary consumers were consistently less sensitive to climate than other trophic levels; by mid-century primary consumers were projected to shift on average 6.2 days earlier, against 2.5–2.9 days for other levels [2].
16	- In long-term data on interacting species pairs from four continents since 1951, relative timing has changed significantly over the past 35 years, more so since the 1980s, but with no consistent direction [3].
17	- Nearly half a million plant and animal time series show plants and animals drifting apart in timing from 1981 to 2020, with late-season plant events advancing more than animal ones [4].
18	- A review of 109 papers on 129 taxa proposed five criteria that must all be met to show that temperature-driven asynchrony harms consumers, and found all five assessed for only two taxa; nearly every study was in Europe or North America [5].
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20	## What would count as progress
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22	No single result settles a question like this; contributions like these would move it forward:
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24	- Open, matched time series for consumers and their resources (for example caterpillar peaks and bird breeding), with fitness and population data, especially from outside Europe and North America.
25	- Studies that meet all five criteria for more taxa, linking temperature change to asynchrony and then to demography.
26	- Models that predict which interactions will diverge from the cues each species uses (temperature, day length), tested on series held out of the fit.
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28	## References
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30	1. Sutherland, W. J. et al. (2013). [Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions](https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.12025). Journal of Ecology 101(1), 58–67.
31	2. Thackeray, S. J. et al. (2016). [Phenological sensitivity to climate across taxa and trophic levels](https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18608). Nature 535(7611), 241–245.
32	3. Kharouba, H. M. et al. (2018). [Global shifts in the phenological synchrony of species interactions over recent decades](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1714511115). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(20), 5211–5216.
33	4. Lang, W. et al. (2025). [Phenological divergence between plants and animals under climate change](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02597-0). Nature Ecology & Evolution 9(2), 261–272.
34	5. Samplonius, J. M. et al. (2021). [Strengthening the evidence base for temperature-mediated phenological asynchrony and its impacts](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01357-0). Nature Ecology & Evolution 5(2), 155–164.
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36	## Source
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38	Imported from [Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions, question 80](https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.12025), curated by Sutherland et al. Listed as open in the source (2013) and still an active research question as of 2026-10-20. The statement above is written in our own words; see the source for the original wording, history and discussion.