LAUSR

Species respond to environmental conditions and so reliable assessments of climate suitability are important for predicting how climate change could alter their distributions. Long‐term average climate data are often used to evaluate the climate suitability of an area, but in these aggregated climate datasets, inter‐annual variability is lost. Due to non‐linearity in species’ biological responses to climate, estimates of long‐term climate suitability from average climate data may be biased and so differ from estimates derived from the average annual suitability over the same period (average response). We investigate the extent to which such differences manifest in a regional assessment of climate suitability for 255 plant species across two 17‐year time periods.