Adaptive responses of animals to climate change are most likely insufficient Radchuk, Viktoriia Martínez Suárez, Juan Gabriel Supplementary Information accompanies this paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467- 019-10924-4. We are grateful to many researchers who collected field data and kindly shared them. Without such contributions this study would have been impossible. In particular, we would like to thank the ‘Wicken Fen ringing group’, Mats Björklund, Richard du Feu, Philip W. Hedrick, Loeske Kruuk, Andrew G. McAdam, Josephine Pemberton, Lisa Schwanz, William Sydeman, Dakota McCoy, Rory Telemeco, Chris Thorne, Marco Rughetti, Wolf Blanckenhorn and Tim Sparks. This study was initiated by the workshop series of the Leibniz Forschungsverbund (LVB) Biodiversität ‘Species adaptations to global change—a comprehensive risk analysis’ 2014 and 2015. Biological responses to climate change have been widely documented across taxa and regions, but it remains unclear whether species are maintaining a good match between phenotype and environment, i.e. whether observed trait changes are adaptive. Here we reviewed 10,090 abstracts and extracted data from 71 studies reported in 58 relevant publications, to assess quantitatively whether phenotypic trait changes associated with climate change are adaptive in animals. A meta-analysis focussing on birds, the taxon best represented in our dataset, suggests that global warming has not systematically affected morphological traits, but has advanced phenological traits. We demonstrate that these advances are adaptive for some species, but imperfect as evidenced by the observed consistent selection for earlier timing. Application of a theoretical model indicates that the evolutionary load imposed by incomplete adaptive responses to ongoing climate change may already be threatening the persistence of species. 2020-05-11T09:49:25Z 2020-05-11T09:49:25Z 2019-07-23 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Radchuk, V., Reed, T., Teplitsky, C. et al. Adaptive responses of animals to climate change are most likely insufficient. Nat Commun 10, 3109 (2019). [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10924-4] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/61929 10.1038/s41467-019-10924-4 eng ERC-2013-StG-337365-SHE http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Springer Nature