Predicting climate driven shifts in the past and future of crop pollination synchrony (BeeSYNC)

This project explores the past and future trends of crop and pollinator phenology, focusing on climate variables as a driver of change over time.

We will investigate whether climate change has resulted in greater asynchrony in the timing of crop bloom and pollinator activity and forecast pollination trajectories under multiple future climate scenarios.

This work advances climate research by linking phenology and vital parameters, such as organism age, to provide process-based insights that allow assessment and forecasting of ecological and economic consequences of climate change.

To this end, we ask (1) Does organism age predict the timing of peak ecosystem function and services? (2) Is climate change altering the age structure of service providing organisms? (3) Do temporal changes in age-function relationships imperil agricultural production?

A team with expertise in crop pollination, landscape ecology, computer vision, and uncertainty analysis, with documented experience in interdisciplinary research, will pursue these aims using a combination field experiments, AI-based museum specimen analysis, and climate modeling.

We will do this in interaction with two key stakeholder groups, growers and seed suppliers, to inform new climate adaptation strategies for agriculture, focusing on the development of ‘pollination-smart’ crop cultivars that can promote phenological resilience despite a changing climate.