Plants picked up to 150 years ago by Victorian collectors and held by the million in herbarium collections across the world could become a powerful ? and much needed ? new source of data for studying climate change, according to research published this week in the British Ecological Society’sJournal of Ecology.

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 ? has hindered scientists’ understanding of how species respond to climate change.

But new research by a team of ecologists from the University of East Anglia (UEA), the University of Kent, the University of Sussex and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew shows that plants pressed 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.

For more, see:

http://www.molecularstation.com/science-news/2010/09/ecologists-find-new-clues-on-climate-change-in-150-year-old-pressed-plants/

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