Phenological Responses to Climate Change in Europe

«Establishing a European Phenological Data Platform for Climatological Applications» is the title of COST Action 725 which runs from 2004 to 2009 with 27 participating countries including Switzerland. The main objective of the Action is the establishment of a comprehensive European reference data set of phenological observations that could be used for climate monitoring and the detection of changes.
A first result of this Action is the study «European phenological response to climate change matches the warming pattern» which was published in 2006 and found immediately a Europe wide echo. Scientists from ETH Zurich, the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss and the University of Berne joined forces and participated in this COST study with projects partly funded by the State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER).
The study is one of the major contributions for the assessment of observed changes and responses in natural and managed systems, using 125'000 observational series of 542 plant and 19 animal species in 21 European countries for the period 1971-2000. The aggregation of the time series revealed a strong signal across Europe: Spring and summer exhibited a clear advance by 2.5 days/decade in Europe. Mean autumn trends were close to zero, but suggested more of a delay when the average trend per country was examined (1.3 days/decade). The patterns of observed changes in spring (leafing, flowering, animal phases) were spatially consistent and matched measured national warming across 19 European countries; thus the phenological evidence quantitatively mirrors regional climate warming. The findings strongly support previous studies in Europe, confirming them as free from bias towards reporting global climate change impacts.
World wide echo on COST Study
This study found a prominent place in the 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) through its expertise in assessing past and present ecosystem responses to climate variability and change. The COST Action 725 research is essential for building a mechanistic representation of phenology into climate models. It therefore has potential to improve the simulation of the terrestrial carbon and water cycle in future climate predictions.
Source: SER and COST Office website