20% of Sierra Nevada conifer forests are stranded in habitats that are too warm

This work is part of a larger body of research that seeks to understand whether organisms (like these conifers) will be able to respond to changing environments in a way that avoids their extinction. It is particularly interesting to study in vegetation, where movement is limited by dispersal and reproduction.

A frequent limitation to these studies, which this one shares, is that often it is assumed that these conifers' future climatic "ideal" (known as their "niche") is static, predicted by their historical niches.

However, there are several modalities among which conifers may change their climatic niche that we may not have been able to observe yet, namely: phenotypic plasticity and evolutionary adaptation. We don't know very much about how conifer species exhibit plastic responses to environmental stress, nor about how evolutionary adaptation may enable conifers to exist in novel (to them) environments.

These studies are useful, but as usual should be taken in light of their limitations.

(source: my phd was about this)