As winter sets in, the countdown to the flowering of bulbous and tuberous plant species begins.
Researcher in the Soil Biology Department of ATK TAKI (Péter Csontos, senior author) and co-authors (Imre Jánosi, Daniel Silhavy and Juliet Tamás) in the New Phytologist (IF: 8,512; Q1) in their recently published article, they examined the long-term data (33 years) on the flowering date of 329 species of plant that are permeated in the soil by the help of bulbs, tubers or rhizoomes. Using a number of environmental factors and the use of a “machine learning” algorithm, it has been shown that the nature of winter weather allows plants to determine the expected length of winter, detect the end of winter and time their flowering on the basis of these.
The full article can be downloaded here:

Jánosi I.M., Silhavy D., Tamás J., Csontos P. (2020): Bulbous perennials precisely measure the length of winter and adjust flowering dates. New Phytologist, Early access: JUL 2020.