Forest fragmentation alters winter microclimates and microrefugia in human-modified landscapes

With over half of earth’s terrestrial biota living beneath forest canopies, our ability to accurately capture organism-climate relationships in forested ecosystems is imperative for predicting species’ vulnerability to future climate change. Assessing the vulnerability of forest dependent species, however, hinges on quantifying microclimates that exist below the forest canopy and might be influenced by varying levels of disturbance in human-modified landscapes. The goal of our study was to examine the multi-scaled predictors of subcanopy microclimate variability across a heterogeneous landscape in Midwestern USA during winter, and to further evaluate whether a widely available interpolated climate model accurately captures this variability. By deploying a network of temperature sensors along a fragmentation gradient, we found that forests in more fragmented landscapes experienced colder minimum and average daily temperatures throughout the winter than forests in less fragmented landscap...