UC Riverside

Anthropogenic climate change represents one of the most serious threats to ecosystems in the 21st century. As temperatures increase, and precipitation patterns are altered, species need to respond to living in increasingly arid environments. The most noticeable responses to changing climate is for populations to shift spatially, typically upward in elevation and latitude, and phenologically, typically by becoming phenologically active earlier in the year. Variation in how individual organisms or populations respond to climate change can alter their ecological interactions. The timing of flowering is species specific, and when and with whom a plant flowers adjacent to can impact their reproductive success. Between trophic levels, the synchronous phenology of flowering plants and pollinators is critical for both plant and pollinator reproductive success. Plant-plant and plant-pollinator phenological synchrony is at risk of deterioration due to aridification, potentially decreasing ecosystem functioning across the globe. While the bulk of previous research on this issue has been conducted in humid systems, plant- pollinator phenological synchrony has been in understudied in dryland ecosystems, which encompass over 40% of land globally. In the following chapters, I leverage natural history data along spatial and temporal gradients to determine the impacts of climatic variation on plant-plant and plant-pollinator phenological synchrony. I find evidence that plant-plant phenological synchrony is sensitive to changes in community composition. Plant-pollinator phenological synchrony decreases with increasing aridity at the community level, but some species are better suited to future aridification than others. My dissertation highlights the importance of understanding phenological synchrony in dryland ecosystems using analytical techniques specifically suited to the stochastic nature of climate change in these systems.