The impact of phenological mismatch varies across woodland food-web interactions

Climate warming is altering the timing of seasonal events across ecosystems, impacting the temporal synchrony of interactions among species (1, 2). For trophic interactions, the match-mismatch hypothesis predicts that when consumers become phenologically asynchronous with key ephemeral resources their fitness will decline (3-5). Most studies of mismatch focus on single resource-consumer species pairs, and implicitly assume trophic specialisation. However, many consumers exploit more than one resource species, giving rise to several mechanisms whereby the negative impacts of mismatch on individuals and populations could be buffered (6). Here we experimentally manipulate phenological asynchron