Cycling race yields climate change insight

Intriguing article from National Geographic, regarding an unusual phenological data record:

36-Year Climate Change Record Found in Cycle Racing Footage

Informative selections from the article:

"De Frenne, who studies the way plants respond to climate change, was idly watching old video clips of that epic race one day. Not only was the weather atrocious, he noticed, but the trees along the roadside were bare. But in the past few years when he’d watched the [Liège-Bastogne-Liège] race—a national Belgian obsession—he’d seen lush trees behind the riders."

"So de Frenne and his colleagues could scan through the old video footage and find the exact same tree that the peloton pedaled past in 1980, 1990, 2000, up through today."

"They found that back in the 1980’s, branches were almost always bare on the race date—but now, the same trees almost always had leaves. In fact, over the ~40 year period, leaf emergence jumped up almost two weeks."

Below, the finish of the 2015 race, won by Alejandro Valverde.