Cold truths: how winter drives responses of terrestrial organisms to climate change
Top Cited Papers
- 10 April 2014
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Wiley in Biological Reviews
- Vol. 90 (1), 214-235
- https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12105
Abstract
Winter is a key driver of individual performance, community composition, and ecological interactions in terrestrial habitats. Although climate change research tends to focus on performance in the growing season, climate change is also modifying winter conditions rapidly. Changes to winter temperatures, the variability of winter conditions, and winter snow cover can interact to induce cold injury, alter energy and water balance, advance or retard phenology, and modify community interactions. Species vary in their susceptibility to these winter drivers, hampering efforts to predict biological responses to climate change. Existing frameworks for predicting the impacts of climate change do not incorporate the complexity of organismal responses to winter. Here, we synthesise organismal responses to winter climate change, and use this synthesis to build a framework to predict exposure and sensitivity to negative impacts. This framework can be used to estimate the vulnerability of species to winter climate change. We describe the importance of relationships between winter conditions and performance during the growing season in determining fitness, and demonstrate how summer and winter processes are linked. Incorporating winter into current models will require concerted effort from theoreticians and empiricists, and the expansion of current growing-season studies to incorporate winter.Keywords
Funding Information
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
This publication has 199 references indexed in Scilit:
- No Trade-Off between Growth Rate and Temperature Stress Resistance in Four Insect SpeciesPLOS ONE, 2013
- Extended leaf phenology and the autumn niche in deciduous forest invasionsNature, 2012
- Winter and spring warming result in delayed spring phenology on the Tibetan PlateauProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010
- Ecology and the ratchet of events: Climate variability, niche dimensions, and species distributionsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- Translocation experiments with butterflies reveal limits to enhancement of poleward populations under climate changeProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- Thermal preference in DrosophilaJournal of Thermal Biology, 2009
- Can behavior douse the fire of climate warming?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- The potential for behavioral thermoregulation to buffer “cold-blooded” animals against climate warmingProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- Phylogenetic patterns of species loss in Thoreau's woods are driven by climate changeProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008
- Voltinism flexibility of a riverine dragonfly along thermal gradientsGlobal Change Biology, 2007