Urban Phenology and Anthropogenic Climate Effects: getting the timing right in a warmer and more urban world

Objective

Human-driven environmental change is affecting wildlife globally, with climate change and urbanisation having major impacts. For instance, warmer spring temperatures and urbanisation have been shown to independently advance the timing of recurring events in wild populations like leafing in trees, hatching in caterpillars, and egg laying in birds. Getting the timing right is critical for predator species like tits that rely on feeding prey resources like caterpillars to their chicks each spring. Tits can adjust the timing of their egg laying to match the hatching of their prey by responding to environmental cues like spring temperatures. In urban environments these cues may be highly modified and less reliable, which could negatively affect urban wildlife populations like tits if they can not track the timing of their prey. The UrbanPACE (Urban Phenology and Anthropogenic Climate Effects) research program will aim to establish whether urban tit populations across Europe adjust their egg laying to spring temperatures in the same way as nonurban populations, and evaluate the ability of urban populations to keep pace with climate change and further advances in spring timing. UrbanPACE will then determine whether spring timings are in sync between species in urban food webs. Using citizen science initiatives across the UK, I will explore whether climate change can increase mismatches between urban species by disrupting the timing of key events like leafing in trees and egg laying in tits. My results will provide new insights on how multiple processes of anthropogenic change interact to affect wildlife and evaluate whether urban populations are more vulnerable to a warming climate.