Using demographic data to forecast climate-change induced range shift dynamics

How will climate change influence species distributions? Ecologists generally assume species’ ranges are determined by climate at broad spatial scales, and that climate change will cause species distributions to move uphill and polewards. However, long generation times and life history stages that differ in their sensitivity to climate are likely to complicate these simple predictions for many species, such as forest trees. We argue that extensive demographic data collected across large environmental gradients can be used to parameterize population dynamic models that better forecast the complexities of climate-change-induced range shifts.