The climate at RMBL has always been variable, but this year is breaking records with new extremes in precipitation and temperature. billy barr measured record-late rain last fall, record-low snowfall for the winter, record-early snowmelt, and many new daily high temperatures this winter. The phenology of most plants and animals that RMBL researchers study is driven by the amount of snow and timing of snowmelt, as is the abundance of some species, so we can already predict that this will be an unusual summer. As I write this in mid-May, we’re already seeing flowers in bloom that are more typical of mid-June.

Some of the variation in flowering abundance we’re seeing is a consequence of events in previous years. For example, many of the perennial wildflowers we study preform leaves and flower buds a year or more before they appear above ground. The monument plant (Frasera speciosa) starts preforming its flower stalk underground four years before it bolts aboveground. We can already see a lot of bolting plants around Gothic, and my guess is that we’ll see a few thousand plants flowering in the valley, somewhere between what we saw in 2019 (31,177) and 2021 (1,693), the last two big flowering years.

Becky Irwin has already been censusing bees for a few weeks and has found that bee abundance and the abundance of the flowers they visit are quite low. She speculates that the large number of Frasera flowers this summer may provide an important resource boost for bumblebees and other species that visit them. The flowers are abundant, averaging about 600 per stalk.  They produce large amounts of nectar and pollen — the plant’s one opportunity in its lifetime to attract pollinators — and are easy to visit for these floral resources. In their 1973 paper about Frasera, Andy Beattie, Dennis Breedlove, and Paul Ehrlich reported 97 insect species visiting the flowers at RMBL.

Spring started so early this year that many species of plants are already in bloom, and they may encounter one of the consequences of climate change tonight (May 18), when the forecast calls for 19 degrees in Gothic: frost damage. Sensitive buds are more likely to be exposed to frost in years with early snowmelt, such as this year, when the snow melted at billy’s measurement station more than a month ago, on April 16. A hard frost on April 15 in the valley of the North Fork of the Gunnison River, where I live in the winter near Paonia, wiped out this year’s fruit crops. Our apricots had started flowering on March 3, and we had lots of small apricots on the trees by April 15. Local peaches, pears, cherries, nectarines, and apples met a similar fate.

After 56 years of returning to Gothic, it’s still interesting to see what the new year will bring, and where the year’s datapoints will fall for all the projects I’m still working on. This year will bring even more interesting new data.

— David Inouye, PhD

David Inouye is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a principal investigator at RMBL. In the early 1970s, he helped establish the RMBL Phenology Project, which brings together long-term studies on flowers, pollinators, and climate to discover how climate affects phenology (the timing of biological events) and how climate-induced changes in phenology may influence plant and pollinator communities and the ecosystem services they provide. 

Top: David during a major flowering event for Frasera in Brush Creek in 2010. Photo courtesy of David Inouye