Urban coastal sus­tain­ability becomes an ever more pressing con­cern as more than half of the world’s pop­u­la­tion flocks to its shores—the places where cities thrive.

Understanding and predicting the biogeographic consequences of climate change requires some pretty sophisticated modeling. Professor Brian Helmuth and colleagues present a framework in the journal Ecology and Evolution to explore how confidence in our forecasts can vary depending on a few simple, measurable metrics of physiological performance.

The majority of the world’s cities lie on a shore­line, and by 2020, two-​​thirds of all Amer­i­cans are expected to reside in coastal cities.