Guiding conservation strategies to tackle the consequences of climate change requires integrating species’ traits and their ability to cope with environmental stress into demographic models. However, this task is still in its infancy, needing a better understanding of fine-scale variability in climate, species traits, and demographic stochasticity.  In this symposium, Gabriela Montejo-Kovacevich, Pol Pintanel, Maria Paniw and Agustín Camacho will showcase different approaches to study adaptative, behavioural, and demographic responses to climate variability in tropical South America and Africa, which ultimately will determine their vulnerability to climate change. Gabriela will show the importance of microclimatic datasets for understanding the challenges that small organisms face in complex habitats across elevations. By studying phenotypic variation in thermal tolerance and wing shape across populations and species, as well as rearing individuals in common-garden environments, she will show how phenotypic plasticity and adaptation may enable some species to thrive across a wide range of elevations and climates. Pol will talk about how unexpected variation of thermal tolerance in small spatial scales may impact vulnerability estimates for tropical anurans. Maria will present her results on how climate-demography relationships determine population persistence among tropical mammals of short life-span. Finally, Agustín will show how geographic patterns of the climatic vulnerability may change according to combined effects of thermal stress and dehydration on the behavior of tropical lizards”. After that, Agustín and Maria will guide the arising discussion and questions among audience and speakers.

Photo: Agustín Camacho