Roles of multi-level temperature-adaptive responses and microhabitat variation in establishing distributions of intertidal species

How intertidal species survive their harsh environment and how best to evaluate and forecast range shifts in species distribution are two important and closely related questions for intertidal ecologists and global change biologists. Adaptive variation in responses of organisms to environmental change across all levels of biological organization - from behavior to molecular systems - is of key importance in setting distribution patterns, yet studies often neglect the interactions of diverse types of biological variation (e.g. differences in thermal optima owing to genetic and acclimation-induced effects) with environmental variation, notably at the scale of microhabitats. Intertidal species have to cope with extreme and frequently changing thermal stress, and have shown high variation in thermal sensitivities and adaptive responses at different levels of biological organization. Here, I review the physiological and biochemical adaptations of intertidal species to environmental temperature on multiple spatial and temporal scales. With fine-scale datasets for the thermal limits of individuals and for environmental temperature variation at the microhabitat scale, we can map the thermal sensitivity for each individual in different microhabitats, and then scale up the thermal sensitivity analysis to the population level and, finally, to the species level by incorporating physiological traits into species distribution models. These more refined mechanistic models that include consideration of physiological variations have higher predictive power than models that neglect these variations, and they will be crucial to answering the questions posed above concerning adaptive mechanisms and the roles they play in governing distribution patterns in a rapidly changing world.