Mechanistic forecasts of species responses to climate change: The promise of biophysical ecology

Abstract

A core challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately characterize how organisms experience their environments and the biological mechanisms by which they respond. All organisms are thermodynamically connected to their environments through the exchange of heat and water at fine spatial and temporal scales and this exchange can be captured with biophysical models. Although mechanistic models

Biophysical approaches to predicting species vulnerability

“…Assessing this ubiquitous threat to biodiversity requires a variety of robust approaches to predict organismal responses to future climates. In this issue, Briscoe et al (2022) provide a road map for using species' functional traits (morphological, physiological, and behavioral) and localized and global climate data to inform biophysical models that estimate the effects of specific climate scenarios on the energy balance and water economy of animals in the wild. Biophysical modelling approaches predict relationships between heat exchange, body temperature and behavior over wide ranges of environmental temperature from functional traits.…”

“…Briscoe et al (2022) present a vision for tackling global change problems that includes a new cohort of global change researchers proficient in biophysical modelling approaches with access to functional trait databases. As physiological ecologists, we suggest that limited access to taxon‐specific functional trait data and a lack of in‐depth knowledge of many organisms' natural history will continue to create a bottleneck in expanding the value and implementation of biophysical modeling approaches.…”

“…Briscoe et al (2022) also note that quantifying intraspecific variation in species functional traits is a prerequisite for accurately parameterizing biophysical models. Such variation can arise from local adaptation or phenotypic plasticity and, whereas morphological variation will often be apparent from natural history museum specimens, which serve as a vast repository for functional trait data, the same is not necessarily true for physiological and behavioral variation.…”

“…At the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Ontario, Canada, in December 2022, Inger Anderson, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, identified the Climate Crisis as one of the “five horsemen of the biodiversity apocalypse”. Against this backdrop, Briscoe et al (2022) have introduced a tool for global change biologists in biophysical models which, if embraced, could provide insights into how novel climates of the future will shape future distributions and abundances for individuals, populations, and communities. With a million species at risk (IPBES, 2019), individually tailored biophysical models informed by functional trait data and microclimate data driven by sophisticated and accessible software provide a solution that is likely to provide some of the best information for understanding species responses and potential mitigation strategies to rapid climate change.…”

“…When mapped onto current and projected future climate data, well-parameterized biophysical models provide robust predictors of future species abundance and distributions. Briscoe et al's (2022) goal is to introduce and increase the accessibility of the biophysical modelling approach to the broader global change research community. They start by introducing mechanistic biophysical models, which use animal functional traits as their bases and compare these to statistical or phenomenological models that correlate species distributions with predictor variables.…”