Scottish Pollinators

27th February 2022

Updates on pollinators and pollinator projects from around Scotland.

For some species, life cycle events are triggered by the onset of rainfall, or by a day-length threshold (photoperiod); genetics also plays a role. But the great seasonal regulator is temperature, which affects so much of organisms' activity and metabolism. It is no surprise, then, that phenology is considered to be one of the best tools to assess the effects of climate change.

Many spring and summer phenological events have advanced in the calendar for many groups of organisms, and these changes have been consistent with increasing average temperatures. Among these effects, the onset of blooming is well documented; several plants seem to be responding to a warmer world during the last 20-50 years by flowering earlier. In Britain, flowering has advanced by almost one month since 1986, and many species are flowering nearly one week earlier in the south and in lower elevations when compared to northern areas and higher elevations, respectively. These changes have been relentless: between 1952 and 2019, the British flora has experienced an average advancement of 5.4 days every ten years.

Plenty of information on the blog at
https://scottishpollinators.wordpress.com/

PHOTO
A wildflower meadow: a profusion of pollinators' food © Richard Croft, Wikipedia Creative Commons