The reshaping of trade-offs under climate warming

Climate warming presents a challenge for organisms across biological scales. While studies have considered how individual traits and fitness components vary with temperature, few have considered how multiple traits respond and trade off against one another. Consequently, one overlooked effect of warming is its impact on trade-offs and how shifting constraints will alter the challenge of optimizing multiple fitness components. Here, we examine how climate warming can influence the occurrence, strength, and expression of trade-offs that shape ecological and evolutionary dynamics. We argue that accounting for the degree of thermal conservatism versus malleability of trade-offs, within and between species, will open new ways of predicting climate responses across biological scales.