Meeting Abstract
The combined effects of the earth’s tilt and rotation result in geographically divergent annual variations in solar radiation ensuing concomitant global variations in seasonal climates. For example, the tundra regions are characterized by biological productivity that is confined to the brief summer. On the other hand, the temperate-deciduous forests exhibit high annual seasonal variations in productivity of all terrestrial ecosystems. As another extreme, the tropical rainforests often experience weak seasonality with only modest variations in annual temperature and rainfall. These geographic variations in seasonal dynamics underpin the evolution of the earth’s diverse biomes as well as key biological processes such as reproduction, predator-prey interactions, host-pathogen dynamics and the impressive annual migrations by billions of animals. However, seasonality is hard to quantify given its multidimensionality. The start of the season is arguably the most commonly used metric to describe the effect of seasonality on the physiology and behaviour of organisms and how changes induced by climate change and habitat alterations affect this interaction. But the start of the season is just one of several yet underappreciated dimensions of seasonality that includes duration, intensity of the annual change, velocity (how quickly those changes occur). Furthermore, seasonality can be characterised based on climatic features or on the concomitant response of the ecosystem including varying degrees of predictability. Here, we aim to introduce a holistic view of seasonality and its biologically important dimensions and put them in context of physiological adaptations, neural and hormonal control mechanisms, and how changes in seasonality may affect the capacity of organism to cope with change.
