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 als..., Plant material
The plant material we used has already been described in a previous study (Brachi et al. 2013) but we provide a short description of this material hereafter. In 2009, we collected 800 individuals of the annual plant species A. thaliana from 49 natural populations in four regions of France with different climatic regimes (Brittany: oceanic climate - 11 populations; Burgundy: continental climate - 11 populations; Languedoc: Mediterranean climate - 16 populations; North of France: semi-continental climate, 11 populations; Table S1- Figure S1 of the associated publication). We collected an average of 16 plants per population (mean=16.3 ±5.6). We collected these plants before they initiated flowering, and grew them in isolation with aratubes (https://www.arasystem.com/asn003-aratubes-360) in the greenhouse (16h photoperiod, 20°C) to prevent cross-pollination and harvest seeds. The seeds we obtained from each individual plant therefore constitute a genetic family. Because A. th..., , # Data from: Predicting fitness in future climate: Insights from temporally replicated field experiments in Arabidopsis thaliana

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wh70rxww8](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wh70rxww8)

## Description of the data and file structure

### Files and variables

#### File: Ecological\_variables\_CG\_Popfr\_2025-03-25.txt

**Description:** Climate data for the study populations. The climate data extracted from worldclim2.1 have been blanked in the file for license reasons but can be downloaded with the archived script 'get-popfr-bioWC2-compute-CG-bioclim.R'. Data for the common garden (years 2011 and 2012) are not blanked as they were not extracted from worldclim 2.1. The units of variables are similar to one used by the worldclim project: [https://www.worldclim.org/data/bioclim.html](https://www.worldclim.org/data/bioclim.html)

##### Variables

Pop: Population name. These correspond to abbreviations of the closest locality's name. See the following table.

| Pop ...,