Biologically grounded predictions of species resistance and resilience to climate change

Cole (1) remarked [it is] “axiomatic that the reproductive potentials of existing species are related to their requirements for survival”; this logic applies to understanding species’ capacities to respond to anthropogenic climate change. Extant species reflect the ghost of environments past: species traits such as physiological performance and tolerance are evolutionary products of environmental selection (2). They must also have had the right traits to weather previous cycles of climate change, a perspective generally lacking in the expansive literature exploring vulnerability to warming. Can these traits be useful in predicting relative vulnerability to ongoing climate change? The only way to know is to analyze such traits of many species in the context of current and projected climates. In PNAS, Sunday et al. (3) advance this approach with a suite of sophisticated analyses in the most comprehensive and biologically realistic assessment of organismal capacity to resist climate change to date.