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Phenology has achieved a prominent position in current scenarios of global change research given its role in monitoring and predicting the timing of recurrent life cycle events. However, the implications of phenology to environmental conservation and management remain poorly explored. Here, we present the first explicit appraisal of how phenology — a multidisciplinary science encompassing biometeorology, ecology, and evolutionary biology — can make a key contribution to contemporary conservation biology. We focus on shifts in plant phenology induced by global change, their impacts on species diversity and plant–animal interactions in the tropics, and how conservation efforts could be enhanced in relation to plant resource organization. We identify the effects of phenological changes and mismatches in the maintenance and conservation of mutualistic interactions, and examine how phenological research …