DOI: 10.5061/dryad.5002200
title: Data from: Thermal tolerance patterns across latitude and elevation

description: Linking variation in species' traits to large-scale environmental
 gradients can lend insight into the evolutionary processes that have
 shaped functional diversity and future responses to environmental change.
 Here, we ask how heat and cold tolerance vary as a function of latitude,
 elevation and climate extremes, using an extensive global dataset of
 ectotherm and endotherm thermal tolerance limits, while accounting for
 methodological variation in acclimation temperature, ramping rate and
 duration of exposure among studies. We show that previously reported
 relationships between thermal limits and latitude in ectotherms are robust
 to variation in methods. Heat tolerance of terrestrial ectotherms declined
 marginally towards higher latitudes and did not vary with elevation,
 whereas heat tolerance of freshwater and marine ectotherms declined more
 steeply with latitude. By contrast, cold tolerance limits declined steeply
 with latitude in marine, intertidal, freshwater and terrestrial
 ectotherms, and towards higher elevations on land. In all realms, both
 upper and lower thermal tolerance limits increased with extreme daily
 temperature, suggesting that different experienced climate extremes across
 realms explain the patterns, as predicted under the Climate Extremes
 Hypothesis. Statistically accounting for methodological variation in
 acclimation temperature, ramping rate and exposure duration improved model
 fits, and increased slopes with extreme ambient temperature. Our results
 suggest that fundamentally different patterns of thermal limits found
 among the earth's realms may be largely explained by differences in
 episodic thermal extremes among realms, updating global macrophysiological
 ‘rules’.
description: Thermal tolerance limits
 of ectotherms and endotherms acorss latitude, elevation, and associated
 environmental extreme temperatureThis data file contains
 thermal tolerance limits for ectotherms and endotherms of the Globtherm
 Database, with some errors corrected and new methodological and
 environmental data associated with each limit. All temperatures are in °C.
 Associated with every thermal limit is the full taxonomy of the species
 (one single upper or lower thermal limit reported for every species), the
 thermal limit type (upper = max, lower = min), the temperature of the
 thermal limit, the metric used to assess thermal limit (lethal limits =
 LT50 or LT100, critical limits = ct, edges of the thermal neutral zone =
 TNZ), and the latitude, longitude, and elevation of collection points of
 individuals assayed. Also included are methodological variables associated
 with each thermal limit: the acclimation temperature prior to the assay,
 the starting temperature before temperature ramping (for critical limit
 studies only), the ramping rate (for critical limit studies only), and the
 exposure duration (for lethal limit studies only). Extreme episodic
 environmental temperature associated with each thermal limit is given, and
 the "acclimation offset" (see paper methods for source details
 of environmental temperatures and calculation of acclimation offset).
 Reference code for thermal limit and methodological data are included as
 "references".globtherm_full_dataset_2019.csv