Data from: Predicting fitness in future climate: Insights from temporally replicated field experiments in Arabidopsis thaliana

Organisms are already facing climate change driven by recent anthropogenic
activities. In an attempt to understand and mitigate the negative effects
of climate change on wild and farmed species, recent research focused on
predicting the fitness of organisms or populations in future climates. The
accuracy of these predictions is, however, seldom tested. To test such
predictions, we grew 800 genetic families of the annual selfing plant
Arabidopsis thaliana in the same field site for two consecutive years with
contrasted climates. Despite observing, in both years, a clear association
between fitness and climatic distance between our field site and the
climate of origin of the genetic families, the diverse set of methods we
used failed to accurately predict fitness from a year to another. This
impossibility resulted from different contributions of climatic factors in
climate adaptation every year, which impeded the definition of a
meaningful climatic descriptor across years. Our results also show that,
for our study populations at least, vegetative growth is a more important
trait for climate adaptation than phenology. We discuss the implications
of our results for predicting the fitness of wild organisms in future
climates and for breeding programs.