Until about 15 years ago teh literature on the effects of recent climate changes on plants and animals was not extensive and few European naturalists, except the Scandinavians, appeared to take the subject very seriously. Since the pioneering work of such Nordic zoogeographers as Kaisila (1962), the first British books entirely devoted to the subject of which I am aware were those by Johnson & Smith (1965) and Ford (1982), while I produced a brief paper (Burton 1975) dealing with British insects.
