ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
A species' response to spatial climatic variation does not predict its response to climate change.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- A resurrection experiment reveals reduced adaptive potential in a common agricultural weed.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- Evolution of flowering phenology over 44 years of climate change.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Eco-evolutionary context modifies a destructive plant invader's response to climate.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Maximum water stress is decoupled from climate, traits, and growth in a xeric oak.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Demographic buffering in natural populations: A multi-level perspective.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- European beech reproduction is not reduced by drought, including the 2003, 2018, and 2022 extremes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Aridity and drought: distinct concepts often conflated in ecological research.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Climate change drives convergent evolution of root traits on Sky Island climate relicts.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Linking Climate and Demography to Predict Population Dynamics and Persistence Under Global Change.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Potential Distribution and Response to Climate Change inBiology · 2025Article
- Environmental data provide marginal benefit for predicting climate adaptation.PLoS genetics · 2025Article
- Climate change is projected to shrink phylogenetic endemism of Neotropical frogs.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Large Differences in Herbivore Performance Emerge From Simple Herbivore Behaviours and Fine-Scale Spatial Heterogeneity in Phytochemistry.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Variation of thermal tolerance during northward range expansion in the invasive golden star tunicate,Conservation physiology · 2025Article
- Winners and Losers From Climate Change: An Analysis of Climate Thresholds for Tree Growth and Survival for Roughly 150 Species Across the Contiguous United States.Global change biology · 2024Article
- Regional variation in growth and survival responses to atmospheric nitrogen and sulfur deposition for 140 tree species across the United States.Frontiers in Forests and Global Change · 2024Article
- Tree rings reveal the transient risk of extinction hidden inside climate envelope forecasts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The space-for-time gambit fails a robust test.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The dominant paradigm for assessing ecological responses to climate change assumes that future states of individuals and populations can be predicted by current, species-wide performance variation across spatial climatic gradients. However, if the fates of ecological systems are better predicted by past responses to in situ climatic variation through time, this current analytical paradigm may be severely misleading. Empirically testing whether spatial or temporal climate responses better predict how species respond to climate change has been elusive, largely due to restrictive data requirements. Here, we leverage a newly collected network of ponderosa pine tree-ring time series to test whether statistically inferred responses to spatial versus temporal climatic variation better predict how trees have responded to recent climate change. When compared to observed tree growth responses to climate change since 1980, predictions derived from spatial climatic variation were wrong in both magnitude and direction. This was not the case for predictions derived from climatic variation through time, which were able to replicate observed responses well. Future climate scenarios through the end of the 21st century exacerbated these disparities. These results suggest that the currently dominant paradigm of forecasting the ecological impacts of climate change based on spatial climatic variation may be severely misleading over decadal to centennial timescales.
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