Global climate change impacts can already be tracked in many physical and biological systems; in particular, terrestrial ecosystems provide a consistent picture of observed changes. One of the preferred indicators is phenology, the science of natural recurring events, as their recorded dates provide a high-temporal resolution of ongoing changes. Thus, numerous analyses have demonstrated an earlier onset of spring events for mid and higher latitudes and a lengthening of the growing season. However, published single-site or single-species studies are particularly open to suspicion of being biased towards predominantly reporting climate change-induced impacts. No comprehensive study or meta-analysis has so far examined the possible lack of evidence for changes or shifts at sites where no temperature change is observed. We used an enormous systematic phenological network data set of more than 125 000 observational series of 542 plant and 19 animal species in 21 European countries . Our results showed that 78% of all leafing, flowering and fruiting records advanced (30% significantly) and only 3% were significantly delayed, whereas the signal of leaf colouring/fall is ambiguous. We conclude that previously published results of phenological changes were not biased by reporting or publication predisposition: the average advance of spring/summer was 2.5 days decade À1 in Europe. Our analysis of 254 mean national time series undoubtedly demonstrates that species' phenology is responsive to temperature of the preceding

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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.

The geographical distribution of the timings of phenological phases is a precondition for detecting regional trends of the annual timings of phenological phases and finding their relationships to climate changes. Therefore phenological maps of Europe have been computed showing long-term means, trends and annual timings of extreme years. In this article maps of the beginning, the end and the length of the growing season as means over the years 1961-1998 as well as for the warm year 1990 are presented. Strong dependences on altitude, longitude and latitude were computed both for single phenological phases and the beginning and end of the growing season. The goodness of fit for the regression equation was between 32% for the end and 83% for the beginning of growing season. The results were consistent with those of similar investigations. KEY WORDS: Phenology · Maps · Growing season · GIS · Europe Resale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisherClim Res 18: [249][250][251][252][253][254][255][256][257] 2001 37°longitude, from Ireland to Finland in the north and from Portugal to Macedonia in the south, the IPGs cover wide regions of Europe (Chmielewski 1996). From the establishment of the first garden in 1959 until 1998, about 60 000 phenological data measurements have been collected in up to 66 gardens.Before the phenological phases could be mapped, a validity check of all the observation data had to be done. All observations differing from the stations' means for more than 30 d were selected and checked. After the observers' remarks had been checked, the selected data were compared with the written records and with the same phenophases of the nearest stations and natural regions. In addition, the data were compared to the observations of the pre-and postphenophases as well as to similar terminated phenophases of the same stations.Gaps in the time series were filled by using linear regression models with 1 independent parameter (= regressor). Regressors were either the same phenophase of the nearest station, the same phenophase of the natural region (Chmielewski & Rötzer 2001), the pre-or post-phenophase at the same station or a similar terminated phenophase at the same station. For the calculation of a missing value the best regression model with regard to the coefficient of correlation was chosen. Missing values were only calculated if the correlation coefficient was higher than 0.70.The annual timing of phenophases is influenced mainly by air temperature. In spring the temperature across Europe decreases from south to north and from the maritime regions in West Europe to the continental regions in East Europe. With increasing altitude, the average air temperature decreases 0.65°C per 100 m. Thus altitude, latitude and longitude provide the possibility of mapping the beginning of phenological phases by using multiple regression analysis.The relationships between the annual timing of a phenological phase and altitude, latitude and longitude could be determined using the ob...