Data from: Thermal tolerance patterns across latitude and elevation

Linking variation in species' traits to large-scale environmental
gradients can lend insight into the evolutionary processes that have
shaped functional diversity and future responses to environmental change.
Here, we ask how heat and cold tolerance vary as a function of latitude,
elevation and climate extremes, using an extensive global dataset of
ectotherm and endotherm thermal tolerance limits, while accounting for
methodological variation in acclimation temperature, ramping rate and
duration of exposure among studies. We show that previously reported
relationships between thermal limits and latitude in ectotherms are robust
to variation in methods. Heat tolerance of terrestrial ectotherms declined
marginally towards higher latitudes and did not vary with elevation,
whereas heat tolerance of freshwater and marine ectotherms declined more
steeply with latitude. By contrast, cold tolerance limits declined steeply
with latitude in marine, intertidal, freshwater and terrestrial
ectotherms, and towards higher elevations on land. In all realms, both
upper and lower thermal tolerance limits increased with extreme daily
temperature, suggesting that different experienced climate extremes across
realms explain the patterns, as predicted under the Climate Extremes
Hypothesis. Statistically accounting for methodological variation in
acclimation temperature, ramping rate and exposure duration improved model
fits, and increased slopes with extreme ambient temperature. Our results
suggest that fundamentally different patterns of thermal limits found
among the earth's realms may be largely explained by differences in
episodic thermal extremes among realms, updating global macrophysiological
‘rules’.