Long-term data reveal widespread phenological change across major U.S. estuarine food webs

Climate change is shifting the timing of organismal life-history events. Although consequential food-web mismatches can emerge if predators and prey shift at different rates, research on phenological shifts has traditionally focused on single trophic levels. Here, we analyzed >2000 long-term, monthly time series of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish abundance or biomass for the San Francisco, Chesapeake, and Massachusetts bays. Phenological shifts occurred in over a quarter (28%) of the combined series across all three estuaries. However, phenological trends for many (~29%-68%) taxa did not track the changing environment. While planktonic taxa largely advanced their phenologies, fishes displayed broad patterns of both advanced and delayed timing of peak abundance. Overall, these divergent patterns illustrate the potential for climate-driven trophic mismatches. Our results suggest that even if signatures of global climate change differ locally, widespread phenological change has the..., We compiled and filtered long-term data for fishes, zooplankton, phytoplankton, temperature, and salinity from multiple monitoring surveys in the San Francisco, Chesapeake, Massachusetts Bays. For San Francisco Bay, we obtained fish and water quality data from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s San Francisco Bay Study (CDFW 2023a), and zooplankton and phytoplankton data from the Environmental Monitoring Program (CDFW 2023b). For Chesapeake Bay, we obtained fish and water quality data from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s Chesapeake Multispecies Monitoring and Assessment Program (Latour et al. 2023); and zooplankton, phytoplankton, and associated water quality from the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP 2023). For Massachusetts Bay, we obtained phytoplankton, zooplankton, and water quality data from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s Water Column Monitoring Program (MWRA 2023). All data were monthly, spanned at least 10 years, and were examined for quality., Analyses were performed using R. The code is provided., # Long-term data reveal widespread phenological change across major U.S. estuarine food webs

Widespread climate-induced phenological change across major U.S. estuaries

Dataset: Fournier et al correlations.csv
Dataset description: This dataset contains all input data for trivariate meta regression model
Columns:
Estuary:Designation for our three estuary systems. SFE=San Francisco, CHE=Chesapeake, MAS=Massachusetts
Station:Station names as provided by collecting agency
Taxa:Name of taxa
Start: Start date of time series for that taxa/station combination
End: End date of time series for that taxa/station combination
Length: Length of the time series (in years)
Latitude: Latitude of the sampling location
Longitude: Longitude of the sampling location
Mean.temp: Mean temperature for sampling location
Mean.sa: Mean salinity for sampling location
Test:Name of the correlation test performed with covariate. PTTemp=Phenology vs Time for temperature;PCTemp=Phenology vs Covariate for temperature;TC...