Macroclimate warming is often assumed to occur within forests despite the potential for tree cover to modify microclimates. Here, using paired measurements, we compared the temperatures under the canopy versus in the open at 98 sites across 5 continents. We show that forests function as a thermal insulator, cooling the understory when ambient temperatures are hot and warming the understory when ambient temperatures are cold. The understory versus open temperature offset is magnified as temperatures become more extreme and is of greater magnitude than the warming of land temperatures over the past century. Tree canopies may thus reduce the severity of warming impacts on forest biodiversity and functioning.

Detailed studies on fossil remains of plants or animals in glacial lake sediments are rare. As a result, environmental conditions right at the moment of deglaciation of the large N-Hemisphere ice-sheets remain largely unknown. Here we study three deglacial phases of the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet as a unique, repeated element in a long sediment record preserved at Soldl in northern Finland. We summarize extensive multi-proxy data (diatoms, phytoliths, chironomids, pollen, spores, non-pollen palynomorphs, macrofossils, lithology, loss-on-ignition, C/N) obtained on glacial lake sediments dated to the early Holocene (ca. 10 kyr BP), early MIS 3 (ca. 50 kyr BP) and early MIS 5a (ca. 80 kyr BP). In contrast to the common view of an unproductive ice-marginal environment, our study reconstructs rich ecosystems both in the glacial lake and along the shores with forest on recently deglaciated land. Higher than present-day summer temperatures are reconstructed based on a large variety of aquatic taxa. Rich biota developed due to the insolation-induced postglacial warming and high nutrient levels, the latter resulting from erosion of fresh bedrock and sediment, leaching of surface soils, decay of plant material under shallow water conditions, and sudden decreases in lake volume. Aquatic communities responded quickly to deglaciation and warm summers and reflect boreal conditions, in contrast to the terrestrial ecosystem which responded with some delay probably due to time required for slow soil formation processes. Birch forest is reconstructed upon deglaciation of the large LGM ice-sheet and shrub tundra following the probably faster melting smaller MIS 4 and MIS 5b ice-sheets. Our study shows that glacial lake sediments can provide valuable palaeo-environmental data, that aquatic biota and terrestrial vegetation rapidly accommodated to new environmental conditions during deglaciation, and that glacial lake ecosystems, and the carbon stored in their sediments, should be included in earth system modeling.

Climate is a crucial driver of the distributions and activity of multiple biotic and abiotic processes, and thus high-quality and high-resolution climate data are often prerequisite in various environmental research. However, contemporary gridded climate products suffer critical problems mainly related to sub-optimal pixel size and lack of local topography-driven temperature heterogeneity. Here, by integrating meteorological station data, high-quality terrain information and multivariate modelling, we aim to explicitly demonstrate this deficiency. Monthly average temperatures (1981-2010) from Finland, Sweden and Norway were modelled using generalized additive modelling under (1) a conventional (i.e. considering geographical location, elevation and water cover) and (2) a topoclimatic framework (i.e. also accounting for solar radiation and cold-air pooling). The performance of the topoclimatic model was significantly higher than the conventional approach for most months, with bootstrapped mean R-2 for the topoclimatic model varying from 0.88 (January) to 0.95 (October). The estimated effect of solar radiation was evident during summer, while cold air pooling was identified to improve local temperature estimates in winter. The topoclimatic modelling exposed a substantial temperature heterogeneity within coarser landscape units (>5 degrees C/1 km(-2) in summer) thus unveiling a wide range of potential microclimatic conditions neglected by the conventional approach. Moreover, the topoclimatic model predictions revealed a pronounced asymmetry in average temperature conditions, causing isotherms during summer to differ several hundreds of metres in altitude between the equator and pole facing slopes. In contrast, cold-air pooling in sheltered landscapes lowered the winter temperatures ca. 1.1 degrees C/100m towards the local minimum altitude. Noteworthy, the analysis implies that conventional models produce biassed predictions of long-term average temperature conditions, with errors likely to be high at sites associated with complex topography.