Scientists make use of old plants
Plants collected 150 years ago by Victorian botanists could become a powerful new source of data for studying climate change.
Scientists say the scarcity of reliable long-term data on phenology - the study of natural climate-driven events such as the timing of trees coming into leaf or plants flowering each spring - have hindered scientists' understanding of how species respond to climate change.
But a team of ecologists have now found that plants pressed by collectors up to 150 years ago tell the same story about warmer springs resulting in earlier flowering as field-based observations of flowering made much more recently.