This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Climate change can look very different at the scale of a forest, field or hillside. A new review shows how changes in vegetation and atmospheric conditions can cause local microclimates to warm at very different rates from the regional climate—and why this matters for understanding how biodiversity will respond to climate change.
Climate change is usually described using regional or global averages. But most organisms experience the climate much closer to the ground or within microhabitats, where temperature and other conditions can differ substantially from those measured by weather stations or represented in large-scale climate models. This local climate, known as the microclimate, does not necessarily change in the same way as the surrounding regional climate.
In their review published in Global Change Biology, researchers from around the world synthesize how climate change can alter microclimates and identify the processes responsible for these differences. "Climate change is often described as a single number for a region. But organisms live in specific places—in a particular patch of forest or on a particular slope.
The climate they experience can change at a very different rate from the regional average," says Caroline Greiser, a researcher at Stockholm University and lead author of the study. One important driver is vegetation. Climate change can alter forests, shrublands and other vegetation, which in turn changes how much sunlight reaches the ground and how easily the ground loses heat to the atmosphere.
"Vegetation is not simply responding to climate change—it can also modify the climate experienced by organisms living under canopies," says Greiser. "When vegetation changes, it changes the local energy balance, and this can lead to very different temperature trends within the same landscape." In one of the model simulations presented in the review, the expansion of shrubs and trees into open steppes in Turkey substantially altered near-ground air temperatures. On the hottest days, shrub encroachment resulted in temperatures up to 16 degrees lower than those in open areas.
In a regional warming scenario, the open areas would warm up much faster. Microclimate is also influenced directly by changes in atmospheric conditions. For example, cloud cover controls how much solar radiation reaches the Earth's surface.
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