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Jonas J. Lembrechts and the SoilTemp Consortium, the 3D lab, University of Antwerp, Belgium

While meteorologists do their best to remove what they consider as local “noise” (trees, buildings and topographic features) in weather data, these sources of “noise” are home to many organisms and thus are critical for ecologists. Indeed, it is the local temperatures near the ground or below the vegetation - often tens of degrees different instantaneously from weather station data - that set the bounds of organisms’ range limits and dictate ecosystem processes such as primary production and hydrological, nutrient, and carbon cycles. Without microclimate data, we not only lack information on the current environmental conditions species live in, but also on the true magnitude of microclimatic changes that species are being exposed to as climate warms.

SoilTemp aims to solve this issue: a global database of microclimate measurements, currently hosting data from close to 30.000 sensors, used to improve global bioclimatic products and explore the drivers of microclimate across biomes. The SoilTemp database has allowed major breakthroughs in gridded climate products, amongst others through the launch of global maps of soil temperature and European maps of forest understory temperatures. Now, we are putting our sights on the complex issue of microclimate dynamics. We try to tackle the question of how fast microclimates are changing in recent decades, through incorporating the interaction between macroclimate change and land use changes, which affect the relation between macro- and microclimate. These new global microclimate data products can then, for example, be used to improve field-based estimates of species redistributions or soil-related diseases. Such improved estimates of species’ reactions to climate and land use change are critically needed to adjust biodiversity management to a rapidly changing world.