We’ve all heard Winston Churchill’s admonition that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. With global climate change the earth is entering a future that may be unlike any we’ve known before, yet still we can and must learn from ecological history in order to understand and address the challenges we face. In this symposium we bring together paleoecologists who have studied historical changes in climate with field ecologists who focus on questions of future change in order to enhance our collective understanding of how grassland and shrubland ecosystems are likely to respond to global warming. Our speakers include paleoecologists whose work has utilized a variety of tools to understand past vegetation change at multiple spatial and temporal scales, and field ecologists who employ experimental, observational, and modeling approaches to assess how rangelands are likely to change under conditions of global warming and changes in precipitation regime. In keeping with ESA’s overall theme for 2010, the broad goal of this symposium is to highlight how different approaches to the science of ecology can help inform our current predictions of grassland and shrubland responses to climate change as well as to identify critical information needs for improved predictive capacity.