Abstract
Global temperatures are rising at an unprecedented rate, but environmental responses are often difficult to recognize and quantify. Long-term observations of plant phenology, the annually recurring sequence of plant developmental stages, can provide sensitive measures of climate change and important information for ecosystem services. Here, we present 419 354 recordings of the first flowering date from 406 plant species in the UK between 1753 and 2019 CE. Community-wide first flowering advanced by almost one month on average when comparing all observations before and after 1986 (p < 0.0001). The mean first flowering time is 6 days earlier in southern than northern sites, 5 days earlier under urban than rural settings, and 1 day earlier at lower than higher elevations. Compared to trees and shrubs, the largest lifeform-specific phenological shift of 32 days is found in herbs, which are generally characterized by fast turnover rates and potentially high levels of genetic adaptation. Correlated with January–April maximum temperatures at −0.81 from 1952–2019 (p < 0.0001), the observed trends (5.4 days per decade) and extremes (66 days between the earliest and latest annual mean) in the UK's first flowering dataset can affect the functioning and productivity of ecosystems and agriculture.
Highlights
The world’s longest running and best-documented meteorological record, the Central England Temperature series [1], places the recent anthropogenic warming trend [2] as unprecedented in the context of natural climate variability of the past three and a half centuries
When the phenological observations are corrected for species-specific extremes in the recorded first flowering time, the intra-annual distribution of first flowering date (FFD), expressed as day of the year (DOY), range from mid-September of the previous year to the end of December in the current year
Our study reveals that the UK’s community-wide mean FFDs advanced by almost one month from the mid-1980s compared to all phenological observations of the preceding years since 1753 calendar year (CE)
Summary
The world’s longest running and best-documented meteorological record, the Central England Temperature series [1], places the recent anthropogenic warming trend [2] as unprecedented in the context of natural climate variability of the past three and a half centuries (electronic supplementary material, figure S1). The scientific value of hundreds of thousands of observations of first flowering dates from a wide range of plant species is related to the high temperature sensitivity of this phenological event, the large sample size of citizen science datasets, and the spatio-temporal precision of the observed intra- and interannual changes (see [8] for an extensive review) Such studies spanning longer time scales and larger biogeographic regions, operating at a community level, and considering a multitude of climatic variables, are rare
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