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 David Skelly and Martha Muñoz 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.
It can also differ among animals as varied as woodpeckers, frogs, lizards – and human beings. Smaller organisms gain and lose heat faster than larger organisms. Some animals can use behavior to avoid stressful conditions, while other species are stuck where they are and must face the stress, Klinges explained. “All of these organisms experience really different conditions,” Klinges said. “You could drop two organisms in the same place, and they experience different microclimates because of who and what they are.”
Klinges suggests that scientists who are interested in melding together the concepts of macro- and microclimates must start with the painstaking work of knowing their respective systems in detail. The appropriate scale depends on the organism and the question posed, according to the paper.
“It is ambitious and necessary to draw inference on dozens or even hundreds of species at the same time if we want to understand biodiversity responses to climate change or evolution across the tree of life,” he said. “But we can’t assume that all species experience climate the same way, because they don’t. We are encouraging scientists to study the unique conditions that their organisms are likely to experience in the real world.”
New sensor technology is making it more feasible to look at what is happening at the animal level than it was in the past.
The paper also suggests marrying methods across disciplines. Scientific research often happens in silos, but applying models across disciplines can yield more complete insights.
“For example, meteorologists and biologists should really be collaborating more actively to understand each other’s language – the meteorologists don’t think as much about how organisms interact with their surroundings, and biologists are not always that good at scaling things up across a large region,” Klinges said.
While Klinges and his co-authors are certainly interested in their respective species of choice, they believe this methodology could also apply to humans’ experience of climate change. Humans also experience microclimates, after all – the microclimates of cities, inside houses, or in green spaces. Human behavior is more complex than that of other animals but broadly integrating paradigms across disciplines offers a better understanding of the world and our place in it.
“Climate-first approaches apply broad environmental datasets across many species, and biology-first approaches characterize climate from the organism’s point of view,” Klinges said. “Neither alone is sufficient. Used together, they can reveal the causal links – not just the correlations – between climate and biology.”