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Phenology has established its status as an integrative environmental science and as a key component for climate change research. We aim to present a review of phenological research in South and Central America. We describe the flowering and fruiting patterns of the main vegetation types studied to date, and highlight areas where phenological information is lacking. Phenological research is still required even though the number of papers published has increased, especially in the twenty-first century. The distribution of phenological studies on South American vegetation was very uneven over the different vegetation types and life forms. Tropical moist forest continues to be, by far, the most widely studied ecosystem while trees were the life-form observed in almost all papers surveyed. Currently, long-term phenological datasets are rare and few long-term monitoring systems are known for South and …