What is it about?
By leveraging over 120 years of herbarium and pollinator data, we show that climate change is driving a mismatch between the flowering of Viola species and the activity of their bee pollinators in eastern North America, with this problem getting worse at higher latitudes. The consequence? Climate change is accelerating secondary extinction risk, causing plants to disappear not just because of climate itself, but also because their pollinators are out of sync.
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Photo by Oleg Saprykin on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This research highlights a crucial gap: Conservation strategies that focus only on “primary” extinction risks directly caused by climate change itself may overlook cascading biodiversity losses due to disrupted ecological interactions. Factoring in the web of mutualisms will be essential for preserving resilient ecosystems under climate change.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a rewarding experience as it brought together collaborators with complementary expertise in plant and pollinator ecology. I particularly enjoyed integrating long-term phenological and modeling approaches to reveal how climate change affects mutualistic interactions. This work deepened my interest in understanding how ecological networks respond to global change.
Shijia Peng
Harvard University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Climate change intensifies plant–pollinator mismatch and increases secondary extinction risk for plants in northern latitudes, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2506265122.
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