title: Casting your network wide: a plea to scale-up phenological research.
abstract: Accumulating scientific evidence has demonstrated widespread shifts in the biological seasons. These shifts may modify seasonal interspecific interactions, with consequent impacts upon reproductive success and survival. However, current understanding of these impacts is based upon a limited number of studies that adopt a simplified 'bottom-up' food-chain paradigm, at a local scale. I argue that there is much insight to be gained by widening the scope of phenological studies to incorporate food-web interactions and landscape-scale processes across a diversity of ecosystem types, with the ultimate goal of developing a generic understanding of the systems most vulnerable to synchrony effects in the future. I propose that co-location of predator and prey phenological monitoring at sentinel sites, acting as research platforms for detailed food-web studies, experimentation and match-up with earth observation data, would be an important first step in this endeavour.
authors.affiliation: Lake Ecosystems Group, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Lancaster Environment Centre, Library Avenue, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4AP, UK sjtr@ceh.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Stephen J
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-3274-2706
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Thackeray
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D057231:Climate Change; D017753:Ecosystem; D020387:Food Chain; D011235:Predatory Behavior; D012098:Reproduction / Q000502:physiology; D012107:Research Design; D012621:Seasons; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis
keywords: food web; predator–prey; spatial heterogeneity; synchrony; trophic cascade