The roles of acclimation and behavior in buffering climate change impacts along elevational gradients

1. The vulnerability of species to climate change is jointly influenced by geographic phenotypic variation, acclimation, and behavioral thermoregulation. The importance of interactions between these factors, however, remains poorly understood.

2. We demonstrate how advances in mechanistic niche modelling can be used to integrate and assess the influence of these sources of uncertainty in forecasts of climate change impacts.

3. We explored geographic variation in thermal tolerance (i.e. maximum and minimum thermal limits) and its potential for acclimation in juvenile European common frogs (Rana temporaria) along elevational gradients. Further, we employed a mechanistic niche model (NicheMapR) to assess the relative contributions of phenotypic variation, acclimation and thermoregulation in determining the impacts of climate change on thermal safety margins and activity windows.

4. Our analyses revealed that high elevation populations had slightly wider tolerance ranges driven by ...