LAUSR

Many questions in global change ecology deal with large-scale patterns, with global databases of species distributions, species traits and ecosystem processes becoming increasingly available (e.g. Bruelheide et al., 2018). Current analyses of these large-scale patterns - and their predictions under anthropogenic climate change - often rely on spatially coarse-resolution global climatic data interpolated from weather station measurements. These weather stations are systematically located in open landscapes, where the wind continuously mixes the air, and are shielded from direct solar radiation, thus ignoring many climate-forcing processes that operate near the ground, at very fine spatial resolutions, and in microhabitats that vary in their terrain, exposure to winds and vegetation cover (De Frenne & Verheyen, 2016).