Recent advances in the climate change biology literature: describing the whole elephant

Climate change biology is seeing a wave of new contributions, which are reviewed herein. Contributions treat shifts in phenology and distribution, and both document past and forecast future effects. However, many of the current wave of contributions are observational and correlational, and few are experimental in nature, and too often a conceptual framework in which to contextualize the results is lacking. An additional gap is the lack of effective cross‐linking among areas of research, for example, connection of sea‐level rise and climate change implications for distributions of species, or evolutionary adaptation studies with distributional shift studies. Although numerous important contributions have emerged in recent years, synthesis of this phenomenon and its consequences has not yet been achieved. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This article is categorized under: Climate, Ecology, and Conservation > Modeling Species and Community Interactions