Microclimatic challenges in global change biology

Despite decades of work on climate change biology, the scientific community remains uncertain about where and when most species distributions will respond to altered climates. A major barrier is the spatial mismatch between the size of organisms and the scale at which climate data are collected and modeled. Using a meta-analysis of published literature, we show that grid lengths in species distribution models are, on average, ca. 10 000-fold larger than the animals they study, and ca. 1000-fold larger than the plants they study. And the gap is even worse than these ratios indicate, as most work has focused on organisms that are significantly biased toward large size. This mismatch is problematic because…