Thirty-six years of butterfly monitoring, snow cover, and plant productivity reveal negative impacts of warmer winters and increased productivity on montane species

Abstract

Climate change is contributing to declines of insects through rising temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and an increasing frequency of extreme events. The impacts of both gradual and sudden shifts in weather patterns are realized directly on insect physiology and indirectly through impacts on other trophic levels. Here, we investigated direct effects of seasonal weather on butterfly occurrences and indirect effects mediated by plant productivity using a temporally intensive butterfly monitoring dataset, in combination with high-resolution climate data and a remotely sensed indicator of plant primary productivity. Specifically, we used Bayesian hierarchical path analysis to quantify relationships between weather and weather-driven plant productivity on the occurrence of 94 butterfly species from three localities distributed across an elevational gradient. We found that snow pack exerted a strong direct positive effect on butterfly occurrence and that low snow pack was the primary driver of reductions during drought. Additionally, we found that plant primary productivity had a consistently negative effect on butterfly occurrence. These results highlight mechanisms of weather-driven declines in insect populations and the nuances of climate change effects involving snow melt, which have implications for ecological theories linking topographic complexity to ecological resilience in montane systems.

Keywords: NDVI; climate change; drought; extreme events; phenology; plant-insect interactions.