Climate change is causing plants in the UK to flower a month earlier on average, which could have profound consequences for wildlife, agriculture and gardeners.
Using a citizen science database with records going back to the mid-18th century, a research team led by the University of Cambridge has found that the effects of climate change are causing plants in the UK to flower one month earlier under recent global warming.
The researchers based their analysis on more than 400,000 observations of 406 plant species from Nature’s Calendar, maintained by the Woodland Trust, and collated the first flowering dates with instrumental temperature measurements.
They found that the average first flowering date from 1987 to 2019 is a full month earlier than the average first flowering date from 1753 to 1986. The same period coincides with accelerating global warming caused by human activities. The results are reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
This ecological mismatch is not as obvious as droughts or heatwaves, but can be equally damaging to biodiversity, and is described as ‘truly alarming’ by the report’s lead author, Professor Ulf Büntgen. Plants, insects, birds and other wildlife have co-evolved to a point that they’re synchronised in their development stages.
The research was supported in part by the European Research Council, the Fritz and Elisabeth Schweingruber Foundation, and the Woodland Trust.