Repeating Historical Studies to Understand Functional Responses to Environmental Change

AbstractHeterogeneity and seeming unpredictability in responses to environmental change is driving a push to understand the underlying organismal mechanisms. The 2024 Vice Presidential Symposium of the American Society of Naturalists aimed to catalyze a promising and underutilized approach to extend understanding: repeating historical experiments or otherwise quantifying organism function through time. Many physiological, behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary experiments or observations reported in journal articles and elsewhere offer the potential for repeating the data collection to detect responses to environmental change. The approach extends beyond resurrection studies, which revive organisms to compare function and performance of modern organisms to their historical counterparts but are severely taxonomically and logistically restricted. In this introductory article, we discuss the promise of functional resurveys and highlight exemplar research repeating physiological measurements, behavioral experiments or observations, selection and quantitative genetic experiments, and measurement of ecosystem function. We also feature novel approaches to infer function from both modern and historical specimens and data, including temporal genomics, quantifying composition or energy stores, and genomic reconstruction. The research reveals key organismal mechanisms that mediate responses to environmental changes and can be accounted for to improve ecological and evolutionary forecasts.