By Steve Scarpa
A new paper calls for ecologists and evolutionary biologists to consider how organisms experience climate rather than how weather stations record it when doing climate-biology research.
The paper “Matching climate to biological scales” appeared in the April 2026 edition of Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Postdoctoral associate David Klinges, an incoming assistant professor at Rutgers University, was the lead author. Yale Peabody Museum curators and YIBS faculty affiliates David Skelly and Martha Muñoz, as well as YIBS G. Evelyn Hutchinson postdoctoral associate Saúl Dominguez-Guerrero, were among the co-authors.
The paper offers a framework for linking climate data to biology at three scales – the macroclimate of a region, the habitat climate shaped by local vegetation and topography, and organismal microclimate, the specific conditions an individual organism encounters.
Climate is typically measured by weather stations. However, animals and plants shape their own climate exposure through behavior, body size, and microhabitat selection. “It is this scale that drives growth, survival, and reproduction,” Klinges said.
By not accounting for each level, Klinges and his collaborators argue important information is being missed.
“With this recognition, we can better integrate two disparate research traditions for understanding climate exposure: the tradition of mapping climate across broad scales, and the tradition of measuring climate from the perspective of an individual organism,” Klinges said.
For example, the equipment used by weather stations could be found in direct sunlight, nowhere near trees or buildings, all of which could influence temperature. Microclimates can vary across systems – a shaded forest floor may be very different than a barren crop field.
“Microclimates can be cooler than what a weather station microclimate records, but they can also be hotter because they are exposed to the sun,” said Klinges, who identifies himself as a micrometeorologist, a specialty that studies surface meteorological processes.
For more information, click here for an article published by the Yale Peabody Museum or here for the full study in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
