Researchers at UC Santa Cruz are contributing new insights into the challenges plants face in adapting to climate change. Prior research has long anticipated that plants might be able to respond to increasing temperatures by changing their phenology—or the timing of seasonal life processes—at a rate that matches the rate of climate change. But a new global-scale analysis, published in the journal AGU Advances, shows that phenological changes are lagging temperature change, and this trend seems to be more pronounced in human-dominated landscapes.