Another piece of the puzzle: linking global environmental change, plant phenology, and health

摘要

Some scientific puzzles take many years to solve, despite a sense of what they will depict when fully assembled. There is now abundant evidence that long- term climate change is affecting plant phenology, advancing the date of spring phenological events like bud-set, leaf-out, and flowering, increasing total pollen counts, and delaying autumnal phase phenological events, particularly in temporal zones." Although it logically follows that changes in pollen season variables would be widely detectable as the climate changes, documentation of these expected findings—solution of this particular puzzle—has been challenging, until now. In The Lancet Planetary Health, Lewis Ziska and colleagues’ document a clear association between seasonal temperature metrics, pollen season length, and total pollen load over the past 20 years, supporting the expected associations.