University of Arizona researchers and their team members at the U.S. Forest Service and Brown University found that the method—commonly referred to as space-for-time substitution—failed to accurately predict how a widespread tree of the Western U.S. called the ponderosa pine has actually responded to the last several decades of warming. This also implies that other research relying on space-for-time substitution may not accurately reflect how species will respond to climate change over the next several decades.

The team collected and measured ponderosa pine tree rings from across the Western U.S. going as far back as 1900 and compared the trees' actual growth to how the model predicted the trees should respond to warming.

"We found that space-for-time substitution generates predictions that are wrong in terms of whether the response to warming is a positive or negative one," said Margaret Evans, a co-author on the paper and an associate professor in the UArizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. "This method says that ponderosa pines should benefit from warming, but they actually suffer with warming. This is dangerously misleading."