Presentation: Climate Warming Effects on Pacific Northwest Prairie Species: Variable Phenological and Reproductive Response Among Species and Across the Landscape

Monday, October 21, 2024, 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm 
Presentation: Climate Warming Effects on Pacific Northwest Prairie Species: Variable Phenological and Reproductive Response Among Species and Across the Landscape
Speaker: Sarah Erskine, PhD candidate in the Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Oregon
Location: Amazon Community Center, 2700 Hilyard St., Eugene

While climate change affects species in numerous ways, one of the most observable effects is the shifting of phenological events, such as the timing of germination or flowering. Increasing temperatures and drought have generally led to earlier leaf out and flowering times, but there is also great variation in how species shift their phenology, even among co-occurring species. This talk will describe how many of our local prairie wildflowers are shifting their life cycles with climate warming, how these shifts vary across the landscape with environmental heterogeneity, and how they may be connected to other plant responses to climate change.

Sarah Erskine is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon where she studies how climate warming restructures plant interactions through phenological shifts. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a field ecologist and botanist all across the western U.S. from the Mojave Desert to the Oregon Coast Range surveying plants and pollinators. Her work in Pacific Northwest prairies has included surveying Taylor’s checkerspot and Fender’s blue butterflies and their host plants, and her current research uses many annual flower species native to the Willamette Valley. She enjoys thinking about how plant communities will change with climate change and hopes to inform restoration efforts with her research.