Modeling microclimate conditions across eco-climatic domains

Ecological niche models are ecologists' multi-tools for understanding and predicting the effects of environmental change on biodiversity. However, most models are built using broad-scale climate data, while most organisms actually experience microclimate conditions at much finer spatial and temporal scales. Thanks to recent advances in mechanistic modeling, we can predict fine-scale microclimate conditions across any spatial extent, limited mainly by computational capacity. NEON provides an ideal means to examine microclimate conditions at a very fine spatial scale within and among a wide variety of ecological and climatological domains.