Early flowering plants in European forests today start their flowering season on average a week earlier than they did a hundred years ago. This is reflected by herbarium specimens, as Dr. Franziska Willems and Professor Oliver Bossdorf from the Institute of Evolution and Ecology at the University of Tübingen, together with Professor J. F. Scheepens from Goethe University Frankfurt, have discovered. The research team used the collection dates from herbarium specimens from more than a century for a novel method of geospatial modeling. This also allowed the team to prove that the earlier flowering of wild plants is linked to climate warming. The study has now been published in the journal New Phytologist.