Pressing flowers between pages…
Snowmelt is a vital source of spring soil moisture in high elevation plant ecosystems. Climate change is causing a shift to earlier snowmelt timing which can cause changes in flowering phenology and a higher risk of drought for high elevation plant species. Drought stress represents a significant barrier to plant reproduction and can reduce plant floral characteristics and survival. The proposed project will study the impacts of climate change-induced early snowmelt on a subalpine four plant species at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Gothic, Colorado in the summer field season of 2022. I will conduct an early snowmelt manipulation and monitor the physiology, floral characteristics, pollination, and demography of four perennial plant species from May until August. The species are from three genera and represent a gradient of phenological flower timing. I hypothesize that there will be differential effects depending on the timing of flowering of the study species. Earlier flowering species will be less effected by drought stress while later flowering species may have increased exposure to drought stress. The proposed project will produce a multi-species data frame that can be used both in further study of climate impacts on sensitive subalpine ecosystems.