Dr. Nick Rosenberger

Research

 I am a broadly trained ecologist that uses floral reproduction, pollination, and mutualisms to understand how global change drivers (specifically climate change and biological invasions) are influencing persistence of species and how these changes reshape ecological communities. I fundamentally want to understand what future ecological communities will look like and what mechanisms govern their structure and transience.

For my masters research in Patagonia I studied how the invasive bumble bee Bombus terrestris disrupted the interaction of the native bumble bee Bombus dahlbomii and diminished its pollination of a native plant (Fuchsia magellanica) through nectar robbing. My work demonstrated that replacing a species interaction with a similarly related species (same genus) does not replace mutualism.

For my PhD research I aimed to understand the constraints that extreme heat imposes on the dynamics of pollination and plant-pollinator interactions. All organisms have a maximum temperature that they can tolerate and range of temperatures they can function within. However, Flowers are highly sensitive to heat and especially so during development. When flowers develop during heat, they produce less nectar and pollen, and the quality of their pollen and ovules diminishes. This creates a catch 22: there is higher demand for pollinators (more visitation needed),  but there are less resources to attract pollinators (less pollen and nectar) and those pollinators must also forage in extreme heat. I found that extreme heat limits pollination and pollinator foraging, and heat’s qualitative effects on pollen and ovules causes insufficient pollination to overcome pollen limitation.

I hope to integrate these lessons of what I have learned into my work at the Chair of Nature Conservation and Landscape Ecology where I will work on the EU project RestPoll, where we aim to restore pollinator habitats in agricultural landscapes. We will need to design habitat restoration efforts that are climate resilient so that our efforts both restore and sustain biodiversity in Europe well into the future.

Vita

ResearchGate

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Publications