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Title: Environmental Cue Integration and Phenology in a Changing World
Abstract

Many organisms use environmental cues to time events in their annual cycle, such as reproduction and migration, with the appropriate timing of such events impacting survival and reproduction. As the climate changes, evolved mechanisms of cue use may facilitate or limit the capacity of organisms to adjust phenology accordingly, and organisms often integrate multiple cues to fine-tune the timing of annual events. Yet, our understanding of how suites of cues are integrated to generate observed patterns of seasonal timing remains nascent. We present an overarching framework to describe variation in the process of cue integration in the context of seasonal timing. This framework incorporates both cue dependency and cue interaction. We then summarize how existing empirical findings across a range of vertebrate species and life cycle events fit into this framework. Finally, we use a theoretical model to explore how variation in modes of cue integration may impact the ability of organisms to adjust phenology adaptively in the face of climate change. Such a theoretical approach can facilitate the exploration of complex scenarios that present challenges to study in vivo but capture important complexity of the natural world.

 
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Award ID(s):
1755245
NSF-PAR ID:
10377659
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Oxford University Press
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Integrative And Comparative Biology
Volume:
62
Issue:
4
ISSN:
1540-7063
Page Range / eLocation ID:
p. 972-979
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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