Meeting Abstract

35.1  Thursday, Jan. 5  Forecasting the sublethal impacts of climate change: no more lizard lovin’ and mussel beaches? HELMUTH, B*; KEARNEY, MR; MATZELLE, A; University of South Carolina, Columbia; University of Melbourne, Victoria; University of South Carolina, Columbia helmuth@environ.sc.edu

Despite an emphasis on measuring and predicting patterns of mortality and species range boundaries, recent studies have begun to point to the importance of sublethal effects of climate change on organisms and populations and the ensuing consequences to ecosystem services. The emerging field of mechanistic niche modelling aims to link the functional traits of organisms to their environments to predict growth, survival, reproduction, distribution and abundance. Here we use biophysical heat budget models combined with Dynamic Energy Budgets to examine the effects of weather on two very different organisms, the sessile mussel Mytilus californianus and the behaviorally thermoregulating terrestrial lizard Sceloporus undulatus. Using input data of different temporal resolutions (calculated using daily data or calculated from monthly means) we show that fine-scale temporal resolution (daily) data can be critical for unbiased inference of climatic impacts on survival, growth and reproduction. This is especially so for organisms with little capacity for behavioural buffering, either because of behavioral or habitat constraints, and for detecting temporal trends. Specifically, results suggest markedly different predictions of the physiological responses of S. undulatus to long-term (30 yr) trends in warming at sites throughout the U.S. depending on the temporal resolution of environmental data used.