The rise of phenology with climate change: an evaluation of IJB publications

Abstract

In recent decades, phenology has become an important tool by which to measure both the impact of climate change on ecosystems and the feedback of ecosystems to the climate system. However, there has been little attempt to date to systematically quantify the increase in the number of scientific publications with a focus on phenology and climate change. In order to partially address this issue, we examined the number of articles (original papers, reviews and short communications) containing the terms 'phenology' and 'climate change' in the title, abstract or keywords, published in the International Journal of Biometeorology in the 60 years since its inception in 1957. We manually inspected all issues prior to 1987 for the search terms and subsequently used the search facility on the Web of Science online database. The overall number of articles published per decade remained relatively constant (255-378) but rose rapidly to 1053 in the most recent decade (2007-2016), accompanied by an increase (41-172) in the number of articles containing the search terms. A number of factors may have contributed to this rise, including the recognition of the value of phenology as an indicator of climate change and the initiation in 2010 of a series of conferences focusing on phenology which subsequently led to two special issues of the journal. The word 'phenology' was in use from the first issue, whereas 'climate change' only emerged in 1987 and peaked in 2014. New technologies such as satellite remote sensing and the internet led to an expansion of and greater access to a growing reservoir of phenological information. The application of phenological data included determining the impact of warming of phenophases, predicting wine quality and the pollen season, demonstrating the potential for mismatch to occur and both reconstructing and forecasting climate. Even though this analysis was limited to one journal, it is likely to be indicative of a similar trend across other scientific publications.

Associations between alteration in plant phenology and hay fever prevalence among US adults: Implication for changing climate

“…Previous studies have shown that temporal changes in plant phenology are among the most sensitive indicators of ecological response to climate change. [12–16;21;41] Here we show that such alteration in plant phenology is associated with increased prevalence of hay fever among U.S. adults. This is, to our knowledge, the first national scale assessment linking climate driven alteration in plant phenology with prevalence of hay fever in the contiguous United States.…”

Millennial‐Scale Climate Variability and Dinoflagellate‐Cyst‐Based Seasonality Changes Over the Last ~150 kyrs at “Shackleton Site” U1385

“…Seasonal changes affect plants and animals, resulting in phenological shifts that can be reconstructed to study climate change and determine seasonality (Donnelly & Yu, ). However, the number of records and methods that are suitable to reliably disentangle past seasonal climate components is limited.…”

Hatching delays in great tits and blue tits in response to an extreme cold spell: a long-term study

“…There is a need to study variation in weather characteristics before and during the breeding period in birds in order to understand the ecological implications of climate change and more frequent extreme weather events (Charmantier et al 2008; Goodenough et al 2011; Pipoly et al 2013; Donnelly and Yu 2017; Marrot et al 2017). Extreme weather events are seen as weather conditions that cause the biological response to be in the 5% of most extreme values of the response variable (Altwegg et al 2017; van de Pol et al 2017).…”