Redefining ectotherm thermal tolerance in a variable climate using big data 

PI: Kelsey Lyberger (Arizona State University)

As climate change drives more frequent and intense heatwaves, it has become essential to quantify not just how hot, but for how long, because survival in ectothermic animals depends on the joint effects of temperature and exposure duration. Traditional single-point tolerance metrics therefore provide an incomplete and sometimes misleading picture of vulnerability under natural thermal variability. This project brings together data scientists, ecologists, and physiologists to develop a database of physiological performance and survival across combinations of temperature and exposure time. Using advanced models, we will build “tolerance surfaces” that describe how animals respond to heat stress, and test these models against real-world data on populations such as mosquito abundance at sites across the US and long-term marine zooplankton records. Our findings will improve predictions of how temperature extremes shape population dynamics and reveal when physiological limits can explain observed ecological patterns.