Preface: Climate change impact on plant ecology

Climate change likely represents the major modifying agents of functional and structural processes in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Its importance lies in the fact that the space-time dynamics through which it acts on environmental systems are scale dependent and, consequently, the responses are also dependent on the space scale. Writing, therefore, on the impact of climate change on the ecology of plant species is certainly a tremendous—highly timely—challenge. This is also given the huge collection of studies that have analysed the consequences of climate change as specific effects on plant species and plant communities. Many studies have been conducted so far on the alteration of primary productivity, which is so important in the economic evaluation of the effects of climate change on agricultural species, but also on forest ecosystems, where the damage caused by environmental pollution has also been exacerbated by sudden changes of climatic parameters. As a consequence of the, only apparently, chaotic behaviour of the climate, the effects on photosynthetic activity and primary productivity are different at the various latitudes and longitudes of the planet. In fact, globally, greening trends (the increased photosynthetic activity in vegetation over time) have significantly increased over the last two-three decades by 22–33%, particularly over China, India, many parts of Europe, central North America, southeast Brazil, and southeast Australia