| Summary: | Recent (post-1950s) climate change impacts on society and ecosystems have been recognised globally. However these global impacts are not uniform at regional or local scales. Despite research progress on such scales there are still gaps in the knowledge as to ‘what’ is happening and ‘where’? The goal of this study addresses some of these gaps by analysing climate variability and vegetation response at the furthest south westerly peninsula of the United Kingdom. This research is focused on West Cornwall (South West England) – an area dominated by a strong maritime influence. The first part of this PhD research analysed archive and contemporary instrumental data in order to detect any trends in climate variability. The weather data was retrieved from the Met Office archive for Camborne 1957–2010 and Culdrose 1985–2011 stations; Trengwainton Garden (1940–2010), and from the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, for Falmouth (1880–1952) and Helston (1843–1888). The data showed positive trends in mean annual and maximum temperature with the largest trend magnitude in the 20th and 21st century. Seasonal temperature change varies locally with the highest increase in autumn spring and summer. Precipitation trends were only positive for the 19th century for Helston. Correlation between precipitation data and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO index) was negative, however the opposite result was detected when the NAO index was correlated with temperatures. Surprisingly, return period analysis showed a decrease in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events post 1975 for Camborne and Trengwainton Garden stations. The second part of this study analysed changes in vegetation distribution in West Cornwall using historical and contemporary vegetation records. Historical vegetation records were used from the Flora of Cornwall collection of herbarium records and contemporary vegetation records which were available online, containing mainly the “New Atlas of British and Irish flora”. Data sets were geo-referenced using ...
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