Climate change intensifies plant–pollinator mismatch and increases secondary extinction risk for plants in northern latitudes. Really!

Global warming/climate change continues to produce alarmism and hysteria! Including prestigious journals like PNAS!

This time it is three researchers from the Harvard University!

Tomorrow the sky is falling!

I am sure the pollinators are not that stupid! They have been around for millions of years no matter how the climate changes!

From the significance and abstract:

"Significance

Climate change can directly contribute to primary extinction and indirectly raise secondary extinction risks for plants—the loss of plant species resulting from the disappearance or decline of their pollinators—by decoupling the timing of flowering and pollinator activity. However, secondary extinction risk remains understudied. Using specimen records of Viola species and their bee pollinators, we demonstrate an increased secondary extinction risk with increasing latitude, indicating that climate change is expected to disrupt plant–bee pollinator networks more severely in northern latitudes. Plants growing at different latitudes differ in their secondary extinction risk, which also varies with the relative importance of generalist and specialist pollinators. Improved conservation plans should account for both primary and secondary extinction under future climate change scenarios.

Abstract

Climate change is altering the timing of species’ life-cycle events (i.e., phenology), but the rates of phenological shifts vary across taxa. These mismatches in phenological response may disrupt interactions between interdependent species, such as plants and their pollinators, which may lead to reduced plant reproduction via pollen limitation and thus contribute to secondary extinction risks for plants. However, secondary extinction risk is rarely assessed under future climate-change scenarios.

Here, we used ca. 15,000 crowdsourced specimen records of Viola species and their solitary bee pollinators, spanning 120 y[ears] across the eastern United States, and integrated climate data, phenological information, and species distribution models to quantify the risk of secondary plant extinction associated with phenological mismatch with their bee pollinators.

We further examined geographical patterns in secondary extinction risk for plants and explored how their interactions between plants and generalist versus specialist pollinators influence such risk.

Secondary local extinction risk of Viola spp. increases with latitude, indicating that future climate change will pose a greater threat to plant–bee pollinator networks at northern latitudes.

Additionally, the sensitivity of secondary local extinction risk to phenological mismatch with both generalist and specialist bee pollinators varies by latitude, with specialist bees showing a sharper decline at higher latitudes.

Our findings demonstrate that existing conservation priorities based solely on primary extinction risk directly caused by climate change may be insufficient to support self-sustaining populations of plants.

Thus, incorporating secondary extinction risk resulting from ecological mismatches between plants and pollinators into future global conservation frameworks should be carefully considered."

Climate change intensifies plant–pollinator mismatch and increases secondary extinction risk for plants in northern latitudes | PNAS (no public access)