acclimatization

A change in functional or morphological traits occurring once or repeatedly (e.g. seasonally) during the lifetime of an individual organism in its natural environment. Through acclimatization the individual maintains performance across a range of environmental conditions. For a clear differentiation between findings in laboratory and field studies, the term acclimation is used in ecophysiology for the respective phenomena when observed in well-defined experimental settings. The term (adaptive) plasticity characterises the generally limited scope of changes in phenotype that an individual can reach through the process of acclimatization.