E&E Seminar Series: Australian Alpine Pollinators in a Changing World

ABSTRACT

Pollinators are essential to plant reproduction, community structure, and ecosystem health, but those inhabiting alpine environments face strong thermal constraints. In alpine systems, cold temperatures, long periods of snow cover, and rapid weather fluctuations create challenging conditions for survival, activity, and reproduction. At the same time, these environments are especially vulnerable to climate change, with rising temperatures, reduced snow cover, and earlier snowmelt likely to alter the conditions that alpine pollinators experience. This seminar examines how pollinators persist in Australia’s mountain environments by investigating their responses to temperature across multiple ecological scales. I combine field observations of pollinator activity with climatic, weather, elevational, and microclimatic data to ask how temperature shapes pollinator communities, daily activity patterns, and fine-scale interactions with flowers. From long-term climatic trends to daily weather fluctuations to the fine-scale microclimates within individual flowers, this work aims to identify how alpine pollinators respond to thermal variation, and how these responses may influence their vulnerability to ongoing climate change.

BIOGRAPHY

Josh is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working in invertebrate ecology, with a passion for the often-overlooked animals that live in hard to reach places. His work spans community ecology, thermal ecology, and AI-assisted taxonomy, through collaborations with universities, museums, and national research collections. Whether flipping logs, chasing bees, or peering into microscopes, his research explores the hidden lives of invertebrates and their responses to environmental pressures. With a lifelong interest in critters, he’s dedicated to fostering appreciation for insects and helping others see the beauty in the small and the strange.