Meeting Abstract

84.6  Sunday, Jan. 6  Microclimatic research priorities for predicting the effects of climate change POTTER, K. A.*; PINCEBOURDE, S.; WOODS, H. A.; University of Montana; Université François Rabelais; University of Montana kristen.potter@mso.umt.edu

Considerable effort now focuses on predicting how species will respond to climate change. Nonetheless, statistical models that predict species’ distributions remain difficult to generalize, both from one species to another and into novel sets of environmental conditions. One reason is the conceptual difficulty of connecting macro and micro scales: there is an enormous gap between the spatial and temporal scales at which biologists analyze landscapes and the scales at which organisms live. Most organisms are small enough that they live in microclimates, which can be highly heterogeneous in space and time, and often quite different than surrounding macroclimates. To resolve the spatial and temporal mismatches between models versus organisms, we advocate: 1) gathering better microclimate data using automated devices, 2) developing better mechanistic models for downscaling coarse environmental data, and 3) improving our statistical understanding of variation at the finest scales. We will discuss why these approaches should be high priorities for future work, and how they will increase our ability to predict the biological effects of climate change.