Aim: Understanding how grain size affects our ability to characterize species responses to ongoing climate change is of crucial importance in the context of an increasing awareness for the substantial difference that exists between coarse spatial resolution macroclimatic data sets and the microclimate actually experienced by organisms. Climate change impacts on biodiversity are expected to peak in mountain areas, wherein the differences between macro and microclimates are precisely the largest. Based on a newly generated fine‐scale environmental data for the Canary Islands, we assessed whether data at 100 m resolution is able to provide more accurate predictions than available data at 1 km resolution. We also analysed how future climate suitability predictions of island endemic bryophytes differ depending on the grain size of grids.Location: Canary Islands.Time period: Present (1979–2013) and late‐century (2071–2100).Taxa: Bryophytes.Methods: We compared the accuracy and spatial predictions using ensemble of small models for 14 Macaronesian endemic bryophyte species. We used two climate data sets: CHELSA v1.2 (~1 km) and CanaryClim v1.0 (100 m), a downscaled version of the latter utilizing data from local weather stations. CanaryClim also encompasses future climate data from five individual model intercomparison projects for three warming shared socio‐economic pathways.Results: Species distribution models generated from CHELSA and CanaryClim exhibited a similar accuracy, but CanaryClim predicted buffered warming trends in mid‐elevation ridges. CanaryClim consistently returned higher proportions of newly suitable pixels (8%–28%) than CHELSA models (0%–3%). Consequently, the proportion of species predicted to occupy pixels of uncertain suitability was higher with CHELSA (3–8 species) than with CanaryClim (0–2 species).Main conclusions: The resolution of climate data impacted the predictions rather than the performance of species distribution models. Our results highlight the crucial role that fine‐resolution climate data sets can play in predicting the potential distribution of both microrefugia and new suitable range under warming climate.

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La vegetación de alta montaña de Tenerife está formada actualmente por un matorral ralo con retama (Spartocytisus supranubius) y rosalillo (Pterocephalus lasiospermum) como especies dominantes. Este ecosistema está sufriendo un calentamiento importante que está teniendo consecuencias en la estructura y composición de la vegetación. En efecto, mientras especies como la retama se encuentran en declive, otras como el rosalillo se expanden cada vez más. Al efecto de las temperaturas hay que unir el de la herbivoría, que en algunos casos se ve amplificado por las consecuencias del cambio climático, de modo que, igual que hay diferencias en la palatabiidad de las especies a los herbívoros, se pueden identificar especies a las que el cambio climático favorece (ganadores del cambio climático) y especies a las que el cambio climático perjudica (perdedores del cambio climático). Todo ello está modificando la vegetación de forma ostensible, con la aparición de comunidades vegetales cada vez más diferenciadas respecto a las definidas para este ecosistema.