Elizabeth Wolkovich

You can think about a bucket of spring warmth that the plant needs to fill before it can produce enough energy to produce the flower.

So for most woody plants, we think there's actually a two bucket system and cherry trees have this as well.

Two buckets?

What is the second bucket?

It's often called the winter chilling bucket.

So it's the idea that the plants need a certain amount of cool weather before they can start to fill that bucket of spring warmth.

If you go outside and you take a cherry blossom in in December, it'll take a really long time to bloom.

If you go outside right now and you take a cherry blossom in, or if you went three weeks ago or four weeks ago and you brought it inside, it'll bloom right away.

Additionally, a lot of the plants appear to need a certain number of daylight hours for that spring warming.

So it's not just that it's warm, it's that they're also getting a certain amount of sunlight.

Cherry blossoms are effectively like our longest written record on Earth.

They go back over a thousand years in Asia.

In the Kyoto record, they have this long-term record.

There's also a record out of China.

Cherry blossoms across the world are blooming weeks earlier than they did in the past.

They're by far, I would say, the best evidence of anthropogenic climate change shifting our springs earlier.

Across the globe, I would say whether it's grasses starting to germinate, whether it's the leaf out of beech trees, whether it's flowering on a plum tree or a cherry tree, those events have consistently shifted between two to four weeks, depending on exactly what plant you're looking at and how much that place has warmed.

As a gateway.

Yeah.

to better forecast what forest trees are doing and what every fruit tree, peaches and plums, all these things are doing the same thing as cherries.