3D printed models are an accurate, cost-effective, and reproducible tool for quantifying terrestrial thermal environments.

Predicting ecological responses to rapid environmental change has become one of the greatest challenges of modern biology. One of the major hurdles in forecasting these responses is accurately quantifying the thermal environments that organisms experience. The distribution of temperatures available within an organism's habitat is typically measured using data loggers called operative temperature models (OTMs) that are designed to mimic certain properties of heat exchange in the focal organism.

Mismatches between phenotype and environment shape fitness at hyperlocal scales.

In the era of human-driven climate change, understanding whether behavioural buffering of temperature change is linked with organismal fitness is essential. According to the 'cost-benefit' model of thermoregulation, animals that live in environments with high frequencies of favourable thermal microclimates should incur lower thermoregulatory costs, thermoregulate more efficiently and shunt the associated savings in time and energy towards other vital tasks such as feeding, territory defence and mate acquisition, increasing fitness. Here, we explore how thermal landscapes at the scale of individual territories, physiological performance and behaviour interact and shape fitness in the southern rock agama lizard ().

Opportunities for behavioral rescue under rapid environmental change.

Laboratory measurements of physiological and demographic tolerances are important in understanding the impact of climate change on species diversity; however, it has been recognized that forecasts based solely on these laboratory estimates overestimate risk by omitting the capacity for species to utilize microclimatic variation via behavioral adjustments in activity patterns or habitat choice. The complex, and often context-dependent nature, of microclimate utilization has been an impediment to the advancement of general predictive models. Here, we overcome this impediment and estimate the potential impact of warming on the fitness of ectotherms using a benefit/cost trade-off derived from the simple and broadly documented thermal performance curve and a generalized cost function.