Leveraging Organismal Biology to Forecast the Effects of Climate Change

Despite the pressing need for accurate forecasts of ecological and evolutionary responses to environmental change, commonly used modeling approaches exhibit mixed performance because they omit many important aspects of how organisms respond to spatially and temporally variable environments. Integrating models based on organismal phenotypes at the physiological, performance, and fitness levels can improve model performance. We summarize current limitations of environmental data and models and discuss potential remedies. The paper reviews emerging techniques for sensing environments at fine spatial and temporal scales, accounting for environmental extremes, and capturing how organisms experience the environment. Intertidal mussel data illustrate biologically important aspects of environmental variability. We then discuss key challenges in translating environmental conditions into organismal performance including accounting for the varied timescales of physiological processes, for responses to environmental fluctuations including the onset of stress and other thresholds, and for how environmental sensitivities vary across lifecycles. We call for the creation of phenotypic databases to parameterize forecasting models and advocate for improved sharing of model code and data for model testing. We conclude with challenges in organismal biology that must be solved to improve forecasts over the next decade.