Issues

Summary: This Review takes a broad view how OCLTT can be looked at as an evolutionary principle that allows a deeper understanding of connectivity and the impacts of climate change in biological systems.

Summary: We provide a quantitative synthesis of the use of cities as warming experiments and space-for-time substitutions to explore plasticity and evolution of thermal physiological traits under global change.

Summary: To better understand and predict responses of species and biodiversity in a world of global change, we need more integration across disciplines, of data and methods, and across scales.

Summary: We explore how detecting and predicting shifts in survival and fecundity fitness constraints can improve our ability to forecast responses to climate gradients and change.

Summary: As models of embryonic development are translated from the laboratory to natural nests and scaled up to populations, fine-scale temperature data are increasingly important yet remain an often-overlooked component of our understanding of thermal developmental plasticity in reptiles.

Summary: Using meta-analytic approaches, we show that diving ectothermic vertebrates are particularly vulnerable to climate warming. On average, dive durations decreased by 11% with every 1°C increase in water temperature.

Summary: Dryland mammals facing climate change are encountering increasing heat as well as reduced water and food availability. We discuss these compound effects on performance in mammals of varying body size.

Summary: Two Arctic marine mammal specialists, polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and narwhals (Monodon monoceros), are physiologically limited in their ability to respond to a rapidly warming Arctic.

Summary: Many physiological variables related to avian heat tolerance vary significantly with body mass, but also vary substantially among taxa that differ in their reliance on panting, gular flutter or cutaneous evaporation for evaporative heat dissipation.

Summary: Plasticity and bet-hedging may be adaptive strategies of hosts and parasitoids to cope with the continuum of predictable and unpredictable fluctuating temperatures in a changing climate context.

Summary: Thermal performance curves are important for predicting warming effects on fish. A review of current data indicates that aerobic scope is not universally limited by warming, and alternative measures are suggested.

Summary: Quantification of organismal energy fluxes under different stress scenarios follows predictions of the ecological outcomes of stress exposures and understanding of the mechanisms of stressor interactions.

Summary: Reef-building corals are under threat from anthropogenic impacts. The partners of the coral holobiont and coral developmental process provide symbiotic, epigenetic and genetic mechanisms for acclimatization and adaptation to climate change.