TrEnCh Tools for TRanslating ENvironmental CHange into organismal responses
Climate change models often predict ecological responses using coarse measurements of air temperature. But animals experience their environment at much finer resolution, responding to changes in environmental conditions at the scale of minutes and meters. We provide computational and visualization tools that translate coarse air temperature models into fine-scale predictors of how animals and ecosystems will respond to climate change. If we're going to effectively fight climate change, we need to understand what it means for the plants, animals, and ecosystems on our planet (photos: J. Martin, M. Logan, G. Tattersall).
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See our science in action
Discover our flagship projects with Colias butterfly and grasshopper resurveys, which we use to explore the physical and ecological consequences of climate change. For these projects, we put microclimate and biophysical models to work, to understand ecological and evolutionary change.
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Discover the basics of thermal ecology
Climate change is a formidable threat to biodiversity, but people don't often understand the ecological implications of 2-degrees of warming or how air temperature translates to the fitness of animals. It all starts with thermal ecology and biophysical models.
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Harness the power of prediction
Part of the mission of the TrEnCh project is to create and share tools that empower others to forecast ecological responses to climate change. Here you can find a variety of computational and data visualization tools that we've been working on.
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Alexander Grasshopper Resurvey
Entomologist César Nufio inherited 250 dusty boxes during his postdoc at CU-Boulder. Each of the boxes contained thousands upon thousands of grasshoppers.
What followed was nearly a decade of untangling the mystery of grasshopper physiology and resurveying the insects, following 50 years of climate change.
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The TrEnCh project aims to build a community applying biophysical ecology to improve models of biological responses to climate change. Join our community to be added to this page.
Join usIt's time for better biological models and stronger climate action plans
#ClimateActionNow
But we're here to put them to work for conservation.
Accurate projections of climate change responses requires moving beyond the assumption that organisms' body temperature equals air temperature, which can result in errors of tens of degrees and can obscure patterns of thermal stress. The TrEnCh project builds accessible computational and visualization tools for translating environmental change into organismal responses. We provide open and reproducible avenues to share thermal ecology.
See our tools >