Rapid and Recent Changes in Fungal Fruiting Patterns

Many studies have demonstrated recentphenological responses to climatechange, but these largely involved higher organisms, such as plants, insects, or birds, and were restricted to events in spring (1). Autumnal events have received far less atten-tion, even though the end of the growing season has seen significant delays (2). Fungi provide vital ecosystem services through decomposition, nutrient cycling, and soil aggregation, yet they are missing from previous considerations of eco-system responses to global change (3). In this study, we analyzed a data set consisting of over 52,000 individual fungal fruiting records, from nearly 1400 localities, collected in southern England over the period 1950–2005. We ex-tracted information on a total of 315 autumna