Plants are flowering earlier because of climate change

The world is not the same when temperatures increase – we've felt it with the recent heatwaves. Like us, plants change their “behaviours” with the seasons – and in response to climate change. Scientists have found that so-called “first flowering dates”, or the first day of the year a plant is observed in bloom, are happening earlier. In the most robust study, researchers looked at almost half a million observations spanning 406 plant species between 1753 and 2019. They found that plants in the UK flowered 26 days earlier after 1987 compared to the years before. The pattern holds elsewhere in Europe, with Mediterranean shrubs flowering 20 days earlier over the last 35 years. Sadly, these dramatic changes are not without consequences. Insects that depend on certain flowers might find they have emerged too late, which is bad news for the birds hoping to eat said insects, and so on. As the world's food web tries to rearrange itself at record speed, plants are being pushed to adapt to an uncertain future.