In addition to the excellent @NatGeo article below, I’d
recommend checking out a couple of other related items of
interest form their site (links after the excerpt). Photograph
by Darlyne A. Murawski, National Geographic You could call them
early bloomers: In 2010 and 2012, plants in the eastern U.S.
produced flowers earlier than at any point in recorded history,
a new study says. This result, according to the research team,
has a bit of a literary twist: It comes from data collected by
U.S. environmental writers Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold.
Thoreau began observing bloom times in Massachusetts in 1852,
and Leopold began in Wisconsin in 1935. Scientists compared this
historical data with modern, record-shattering high temperatures
in Massachusetts and Wisconsin during 2010 and 2012. (See “Heat
Waves ‘Almost Certainly’ Due to Global Warming?”) They
discovered that those two recent warm spells triggered many
spring-flowering plants to blossom up to 4.1 days earlier for
every 1.8-degrees Fahrenheit (degr