Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Ecology has long recognized that time shapes ecological systems, from populations to ecosystems, but anthropogenic climate change has made the importance of time much clearer. Warming has accelerated biological processes and stretched growing seasons with global consequences. This Canada Research Chair in Temporal Ecology has already documented shifts in the start of spring (such as earlier leafout) of 2-3 weeks with warming. First principles predict these extended seasons should lead to increased plant growth, as plants have more time to take up light and nutrients with longer seasons. A suite of studies have failed to find this link, however, with major implications for how we mitigate and adapt to climate change. Understanding when and why plants do not grow more with longer growing seasons requires merging the science of climate change, and climate change impacts, with fundamental biological models on the limits of plant growth. My proposed research over the next five years will address this major challenge---exploiting my lab's cross-disciplinary expertise in climatology and ecology to develop a framework to predict how longer seasons link to increased plant growth. I will do this by merging data from long-term observational studies with short-term experiments to address two critical questions: (1) How does warming impact plant performance through shifted phenology across temperate species on short and longer timescales? (2) What are the relative impacts of longer growing seasons versus changes in other stressors that can impact plant growth across species? Leveraging theory and models from life history, plant strategy and coexistence, this research will advance fundamental ecological science and provide critical data to better predict the future of temperate and boreal forests with climate change.