Conclusion
While long-term observational studies of phenological responses to climate warming are extremely valuable to understand how ongoing phenological shifts alter species interactions, experimental approaches combined with parameterized dynamic models can help disentangle the roles that biotic and abiotic environmental variations play in altering the strength and persistence of species interactions in future climatic conditions. Our combined experimental and model simulation study showed that the strength and persistence of species interactions are sensitive to phenological shifts among interacting species, but to what extent varied with community context. We found that the presence of another host species helps promote long-term persistence of species interactions across a range of phenological relationships, temperatures, and levels of resource competition. Thus, the loss of biodiversity may exacerbate these effects and its preservation should be a priority, given its important role in maintaining species interactions in the face of ongoing phenological shifts, increased temperatures, and changes in other biotic environmental factors (Foristeret al. 2019). Incorporating community contexts into future phenological research will be critical if we are to understand and accurately predict the consequences of phenological shifts on entire ecological communities.