Plant and animal species are responding to the changes by shifting their ranges northward and by changing the timing of their activities to coincide with an earlier spring. The fragmented nature of the European landscape, however, may make it difficult for less adaptive species to respond to continued climatic warming. Emergence of a frozen Stone Age mummy from a melting glacier in the Oetztal Alps indicates that glacial ice is more reduced today than at any time during the past 5,000 years. Spawning was 9 to 10 days earlier over a 17-year period. The four earliest leafing dates occurred in the past decade, a response to increasing temperatures during January to March over the past 41 years.
Alpine plants retreat up mountains .
Over a 70 to 90 year period, alpine plants in the Austrian and Swiss Alps moved higher up on mountain slopes in response to an increase in average annual temperature. Butterfly ranges shift northward . 22 of 35 butterfly species studied have shifted their ranges northwards by 22 to 150 miles, consistent with a 1.4 o F warming over the past century. Mollusk range shift . Spain lost more than 1.2 million acres of forest to wildfires in 1994, and 370,000 acres burned in each of Greece and Italy in 1998.