It’s a snapshot of climate change in action: Plants and pollinators on the slopes of one of Colorado’s most famous mountains are falling out of sync with one another.
Researchers say rising temperatures and early snowmelt atop Pikes Peak are causing some noticeable shifts in the ecosystem and throwing off some important life cycles.
Wildflowers on the mountain are blooming earlier, and pollinators like bees and butterflies are emerging at different times. And that’s concerning because we rely on pollinators to make our crops grow.
Julian Resasco, an associate professor of ecology and biology at the University of Colorado Boulder studied these cycles with a team of researchers. The findings were published last month in American Naturalist.
He joined Erin O’Toole to discuss what the researchers found, and how the work began with a study from a century ago looking at flowers and bees in the same area of Pikes Peak.
