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A new paper published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution argues that ecologists and evolutionary biologists should align their climate data with the spatial and temporal scales at which organisms actually experience environmental conditions, rather than relying on data from weather stations that may not reflect local microclimates. The study, led by David Klinges and co-authored by Yale Peabody Museum curators David Skelly and Martha Muñoz, highlights a fundamental mismatch between how climate is measured and how it is biologically relevant to living organisms. The authors advocate for a methodological shift in climate-biology research to improve the accuracy of predictions about how species respond to climate change.
Why it matters
Correcting this scale mismatch could significantly improve models used to predict species distributions, extinction risks, and evolutionary responses under ongoing climate change, with direct implications for conservation planning and biodiversity policy.
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,” is published in the April 2026 edition of Trends in Ecology & Evolution. Postdoctoral associate David Klinges, an incoming assistant professor at Rutgers University, was the lead author, and Yale Peabody Museum curators David Skelly and Martha Muñoz were among the co-authors.
Source: Paper calls for biologists to rethink how they analyze the impact of climate