Flowers are now blooming in January in the U.K.

Welcome to our weekly newsletter where we highlight environmental trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world.

Hi, I’m Jill. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of the impact we can have. I hope you’ll enjoy this look at the U.K.’s annual plant hunt and how it’s become a useful tool for scientists studying climate change.

This week:

Data collected by thousands of citizens across the British Isles on New Year's Day shows hundreds more native plant species in bloom on Jan. 1 than would have been expected a few decades ago. It’s a finding scientists have been able to correlate with warming temperatures.

Using 10 years of data from the annual New Year Plant Hunt, the U.K.’s Met Office found for every 1 C rise in temperature in a given location, an average of 2.5 additional species are blooming on Jan. 1. A more robust report using this “citizen science” is expected in the coming months.

“This started off as a bit of fun,” said Louise Marsh of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, which runs the annual event. “Now we're really looking at it as collecting hard scientific data that can be analyzed.”

In its 15th year, the New Year Plant Hunt started with two botanists curious about changing blooming patterns in the U.K. It’s grown to an event with nearly 3,700 participants kicking off the new year with neighbourhood hikes and hot chocolate breaks to track nature in their communities.

Marsh says traditional phenology textbooks — those that study seasonal life cycles in nature — indicate 10 native plant species should be expected to be in bloom across the U.K. and Ireland on Jan. 1. This year, 663 total species were recorded in bloom, more than half of them native species.

“It’s astonishing,” Marsh said. “The worrying thing is going to be, what impact does this have on our other wildlife? You know, the invertebrates, the pollinators.”

Anyone can participate in the New Year Plant Hunt. The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland provides educational resources and has experts reviewing submitted records and photos to ensure reports are accurate. With those checks in place, the scale of observation has huge value.

“You can't get that kind of level of detail and the specific information [with satellites and drones] that a human can get,” said Debbie Hemming, the Met Office’s scientific manager for nature and climate. She says citizen science and weather are “a match made in heaven.”

Applying citizen observation to study climate impacts isn’t new — in fact, a similar study was conducted in Canada in 2013, concluding that plant flowering here is advancing by about nine days per degree Celsius, using data from 2001 to 2012. It used data from a citizen science program called PlantWatch, under a broader observation program called Canada NatureWatch.

Hemming says she’d like to work with other citizen science networks to find trends in their observations, and help paint a fuller picture of climate change’s impacts on nature.

The message Marsh wants people to glean from the events in the British Isles is the power in observation.