The Pan European Phenology (PEP) project is a European infrastructure to promote and facilitate phenological research, education, and environmental monitoring. The main objective is to maintain and develop a Pan European Phenological database (PEP725) with an open, unrestricted data access for science and education. PEP725 is the successor of the database developed through the COST action 725 "Establishing a European phenological data platform for climatological applications" working as a single access point for European-wide plant phenological data. So far, 32 European meteorological services and project partners from across Europe have joined and supplied data collected by volunteers from 1868 to the present for the PEP725 database. Most of the partners actively provide data on a regular basis. The database presently holds almost 12 million records, about 46 growing stages and 265 plant species (including cultivars), and can be accessed via http://www.pep725.eu/ . Users of the PEP725 database have studied a diversity of topics ranging from climate change impact, plant physiological question, phenological modeling, and remote sensing of vegetation to ecosystem productivity.

Long-term changes of plant phenological phases determined by complex interactions of environmental factors are in the focus of recent climate impact research. There is a lack of studies on the comparison of biogeographical regions in Europe in terms of plant responses to climate. We examined the flowering phenology of plant species to identify the spatio-temporal patterns in their responses to environmental variables over the period 1970-2010. Data were collected from 12 countries along a 3000-km-long, North-South transect from northern to eastern Central Europe.Biogeographical regions of Europe were covered from Finland to Macedonia. Robust statistical methods were used to determine the most influential factors driving the changes of the beginning of flowering dates. Significant species-specific advancements in plant flowering onsets within the Continental (3 to 8.3 days), Alpine (2 to 3.8 days) and by highest magnitude in the Boreal biogeographical regions (2.2 to 9.6 days per decades) were found, while less pronounced responses were detected in the Pannonian and Mediterranean regions. While most of the other studies only use mean temperature in the models, we show that also the distribution of minimum and maximum temperatures are reasonable to consider as explanatory variable. Not just local (e.g. temperature) but large scale (e.g. North Atlantic Oscillation) climate factors, as well as altitude and latitude play significant role in the timing of flowering across biogeographical regions of Europe. Our analysis gave evidences that species show a delay in the timing of flowering with an increase in latitude (between the geographical coordinates of 40.9 and 67.9), and an advance with changing climate. The woody species (black locust and small-leaved lime) showed stronger advancements in their timing of flowering than the herbaceous species (dandelion, lily of the valley). In later decades (1991-2010), more pronounced phenological change was detected than during the earlier years (1970-1990), which indicates the increased influence of human induced higher spring temperatures in the late twentieth century.

Bees are the most important group of flower visitors providing an essential ecosystem service, namely pollination. Due to the worldwide decline of bees, there should be standardized sampling methods in place to ensure consistent and comparable results between studies. We compared the two commonly used sampling methods of yellow pan traps and transect walk to determine (i) which habitat variables affect the species composition, abundance and species richness of sampled bee communities, (ii) which method potentially contains sampling bias towards some individuals or groups of bees and (iii) the efficiency of sampling in various habitats. We conducted fieldwork in different agricultural habitats distributed along landscape heterogeneity and topography gradients. Our results showed that the height of vegetation, the average number of flowers and the amount of woody vegetation had the greatest influence on the sampling efficiency. Our survey also demonstrated that sampling by transect walk captured less bees in general, especially in stubble, maize, and cereal fields. We found that Apis mellifera and Bombus spp. were well represented in samples collected by the transect walk method, while the abundance of other genera, especially Dasypoda, Hylaeus and Panurgus was higher in pan traps. Based on the results, we suggest (i) the transect walk method to compare samples of flower-visiting wild bee communities from various habitats of different vegetation and flower characteristics, (ii) application of the transect walk or pan traps to compare similar habitats and (iii) adoption of a comprehensive method which would incorporate both sampling techniques to gain a more complex insight into wild bee species composition.

Advancing spring phenology is a well documented consequence of anthropogenic climate change, but it is not well understood how climate change will affect the variability of phenology year to year. Species' phenological timings reflect the adaptation to a broad suite of abiotic needs (e.g., thermal energy) and biotic interactions (e.g., predation and pollination), and changes in patterns of variability may disrupt those adaptations and interactions. Here, we present a geographically and taxonomically broad analysis of phenological shifts, temperature sensitivity, and changes in interannual variability encompassing nearly 10,000 long‐term phenology time series representing more than 1000 species across much of the Northern Hemisphere. We show that the timings of leaf‐out, flowering, insect first‐occurrence, and bird arrival were the most sensitive to temperature variation and have advanced at the fastest pace for early‐season species in colder and less seasonal regions. We did not find evidence for changing variability in warmer years in any phenophase groups, although leaf‐out and flower phenology have become moderately but significantly less variable over time. Our findings suggest that climate change has not to this point fundamentally altered the patterns of interannual phenological variability.

It is known from many studies that plant species show a delay in the timing of flowering events with an increase in latitude and altitude, and an advance with an increase in temperature. Furthermore, in many locations and for many species, flowering dates have advanced over the long-term. New insights using survival modeling are given based on data collected (1970-2010) along a 3000-km long transect from northern to eastern central Europe. We could clearly observe that in the case of dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) the risk of flowering time, in other words the probability that flowering occurs, is higher for an earlier day of year in later decades. Our approach assume that temperature has greater influence than precipitation on the timing of flowering. Evaluation of the predictive power of tested models suggests that Cox models may be used in plant phenological research. The applied Cox model provides improved predictions of flowering dates compared to traditional regression methods and gives further insights into drivers of phenological events.