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The great acceleration of plant phenological shifts

Nature Climate Change volume 12, pages 300–302 (2022)Cite this article

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To the Editor — The world’s longest time series of plant blooming and leaf-out in spring reveal unprecedented shifts since the middle of the 1980s in line with the acceleration of global warming. These long-term time series provide powerful evidence of the impact of global warming on life on Earth and can help raise awareness of the urgent need to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions among citizens, decision makers and future generations.

With the rise of Homo sapiens, the Earth has experienced drastic landscape changes and biodiversity losses. For example, during the prehistoric and preindustrial periods, forest cover and biodiversity declined massively in the world’s most populated regions due to the rise of agriculture and the increasing need for firewood and building materials1,2. These abrupt changes have been highlighted by the scientific community through paleoecological and archaeological records and modelling, without being directly visible or understandable to the general public because the sources do not constitute tangible continuous records. More recently, since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have led to massive changes in climatic, biotic and socio-economic indicators, a period now called the Anthropocene3. These changes accelerated considerably after the 1950s, a period often referred to as ‘the great acceleration’4, with particularly strong ecological and biogeochemical changes since the 1980s (ref. 5). Unlike the pre-Anthropocene changes, climatic changes and seasonal plant activity have been recorded continuously for several centuries in a few locations and can be used to demonstrate the impact of human activities on global warming and its consequences for living organisms. In fact, the phenological cycle of plants and animals is strongly temperature dependent, and spring phenological events (for example, flowering or egg hatching in birds) in boreal, temperate and subtropical regions have progressively advanced over recent warmer decades6,7. However, phenological observations are very limited before 1950, and we thus lack important information on whether current trends during the great acceleration of the Anthropocene are unique over longer timescales. Here we present the five world’s longest phenological time series known to date to provide evidence for an abrupt change linked to the current acceleration of global warming.

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Fig. 1: The world’s longest phenological time series with the associated spring temperatures.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all recorders and institutions that provided phenological observations for the different long-term time series for decades and centuries. Y.V. is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (research grant no. 315230_192712) and the SwissForestLab (research grant no. SFL-17 P2). C.M.Z. is funded by the Ambizione grant (grant no. PZ00P3_193646).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. WSL Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

    Y. Vitasse & F. Baumgarten

  2. Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT), Bern, Switzerland

    Y. Vitasse & T. Rutishauser

  3. Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    C. M. Zohner

  4. Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, Zurich, Switzerland

    B. Pietragalla & R. Gehrig

  5. Key Laboratory of Land Surface Pattern and Simulation, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    J. Dai & H. Wang

  6. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    J. Dai

  7. China-Pakistan Joint Research Center on Earth Sciences, CAS-HEC, Islamabad, Pakistan

    J. Dai

  8. Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Osaka Prefecture University, Sakai, Japan

    Y. Aono

  9. Department of Zoology, Poznań University of Life Sciences, Poznań, Poland

    T. H. Sparks

  10. Museum of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    T. H. Sparks

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  1. Y. Vitasse
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Correspondence to Y. Vitasse.

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Vitasse, Y., Baumgarten, F., Zohner, C.M. et al. The great acceleration of plant phenological shifts. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 300–302 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01283-y

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