The estimation of the carbon balance in ecosystems, regions, and the biosphere is currently one of the main concerns in the study of the ecology of global change. Current remote sensing methodologies for estimating gross primary productivity are not satisfactory because they rely too heavily on (i) the availability of climatic data, (ii) the definition of land‐use cover, and (iii) the assumptions of the effects of these two fa...

Phenological changes in response to climatic warming have been detected across a wide range of organisms. Butterflies stand out as one of the most popular groups of indicators of climatic change, given that, firstly, they are poikilothermic and, secondly, have been the subject of thorough monitoring programmes in several countries for a number of decades. Here we provide for the first time strong evidence of phenological chang...

The available data on climate over the past century indicate that the earth is warming. Important biological effects, including changes of plant and animal life cycle events, have already been reported. However, evidence of such effects is still scarce and has been mostly limited to northern latitudes. Here we provide the first long‐term (1952–2000) evidence of altered life cycles for some of the most abundant Mediterranean pl...

Summary Additional biological evidence is presented for the alteration of biogeochemical cycles by human activities. The leaf δ 15 N and the concentrations of nutrients in herbarium specimens of 24 species of vascular plants and 3 species of bryophytes collected in northern and eastern regions of Spain have substantially changed throughout the XX century. In the second half of the century, when anthropogenic nitrogen fixation...

Summary Leaf mineral concentrations of co‐occurring Erica arborea, Juniperus communis and Myrtus communis were measured at bimonthly intervals throughout a year in a natural CO 2 spring and in a nearby control site with similar soil chemistry in a Mediterranean environment. There were different responses to the elevated [CO 2 ] ( c . 700 μL L −1 ) of the spring site plants depending on the element and the species. In the CO 2...