Thermal sensitivity of UK butterflies in space versus time

Predicting how species will respond to climate change is one of the major challenges that today's ecologists are faced with.

A very common approach for projecting a species distribution into the future rests on the assumption that the relationships between climatic variables and abundance estimated across space are transferable over time as climate changes. This assumption has rarely been tested.

The exceptional long-term population data arising from the UK butterfly monitoring (UKBMS) scheme provides a rare opportunity to test the pivotal assumption of space for time transferability of the temperature-abundance relationship.