A species' response to spatial climatic variation does not predict its response to climate change

The dominant paradigm for assessing ecological responses to climate change assumes that future states of individuals and populations can be predicted by current, species-wide performance variation across spatial climatic gradients. However, if the fates of ecological systems are better predicted by past responses to in situ climatic variation through time, this current analytical paradigm may be severely misleading. Empirically testing whether spatial or temporal climate responses better predict how species respond to climate change has been elusive, largely due to restrictive data requirements. Here we leverage a newly collected network of ponderosa pine tree-ring time series to test whether statistically inferred responses to spatial versus temporal climatic variation better predict how trees have responded to recent climate change. When compared to observed tree growth responses to climate change since 1980, predictions derived from spatial climatic variation were wrong in both magni..., Study species
Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa sensu lato) is widely distributed in western North America throughout a highly disjunct range that encompasses a tremendous breadth of climatic conditions, with mean annual temperatures ranging from 0 to 15 degrees Celsius and 200 to 2100 millimeters of mean annual cumulative precipitation (Figure 1).The most commonly used taxonomy recognizes two varieties of P. ponderosa, var. scopulorum and var. ponderosa – the interior and Pacific varieties, respectively (24).  The most recent molecular work has found evidence of more complex taxonomic structuring within ponderosa pine (17, 18), indicating at least four lineages. However, these finer taxonomic divisions do not seem to align with differences in climate sensitivities (19, 55), and do not yet have precisely defined geographic boundaries, preventing the confident assignment of populations to these taxonomic units without genetic analyses. Hence the analyses presented in the main body of this ..., , # Data from: A species' response to spatial climatic variation does not predict its response to climate change

This dataset contains tree ring timeseries and associated historical climate data used in the manuscript titled \"A species' response to spatial climatic variation does not predict its response to climate change\", by Daniel L. Perret, Margaret E. K. Evans, and Dov F. Sax. See Methods for description of data collection procedures. In brief, representative samples were collected from populations of ponderosa pine in the western United States that span the breadth of the climate space occupied by the species.

## Description of the data and file structure

The data are contained in a single .csv file. This file is a dataframe with 36,608 rows and 32 columns. Each row corresponds to an individual annual growth increment for some tree during some year in some location. The column labels and their meanings are thus:

*Series* - unique identifier for the tree core sample the data ca...