Predicting fitness in future climates: insights from temporally replicated field experiments in <i>Arabidopsis thaliana</i>.

ABSTRACT: Organisms are already facing climate change. To understand and mitigate the negative effects of climate change on wild and cultivated species, recent research has 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 a set of 800 genetic families of the annual plant Arabidopsis thaliana in the same field site located in Northern France for 2 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 these genetic families, the diverse set of methods we used failed to accurately predict fitness from a year to another. This low accuracy

SUBMITTER: Villoutreix R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12448203 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature