Sugar maple responses to climate change: We’ll boil it down for you

•We modeled the effects of climate on the sap volume and sugar concentration of sugar maple using data from individual, gravity-tapped trees across the species’ range.•Houle and Duschene’s industry-derived dataset includes an arbitrary mix of gravity tapping and vacuum tubing collection of sap and is restricted to the geographic center of current maple syrup production.•The Houle and Duchesne approach obscures relationships between climate and the physiological responses that affect sap quality and quantity, limits the range of modeled climate conditions, and is thus an inappropriate validation of our model.•We maintain that our model suggests a climate optimum for syrup production, based on range-wide data on the underlying ecophysiological responses of individual trees.•We point out other mischaracterizations of our work, and suggest more productive avenues of future research.