Pick where you garden, then drag the year. For US locations your USDA Zone anchors the value at the historical year; the climate-model trajectory is layered on top. Canadian locations show the NRCan zone alongside Plotwright's USDA-equivalent projection. International locations use a true coldest-day estimate (NASA NEX-GDDP-CMIP6) with the same warming trajectory.
📍 Showing zones for Chicago, IL
Drag to scrub through years. Anchor ticks mark the four published CHELSA windows.
Chicago, IL
Great Lakes, USA
2025
Zone 7a
Plotwright
(likely) · SSP3-7.0 (regional rivalry)
1 half-zone warmer than your USDA Zone 6b baseline. Plants near the cold edge of their tolerance gain headroom here; plants near the warm edge lose it.
In plain terms: cold winters — coldest nights typically around 3°F.
Your zone in 2050
Chicago, IL
Great Lakes, USA
Zone 7a today
→
Zone 7b by 2050
Plotwright
SSP3-7.0 (regional rivalry)
Chicago, IL: Zone 7a today → Zone 7b by 2050 · SSP3-7.0
Heat tolerance · Plotwright Tier
How is this calculated?
Loading CHELSA bio05 trajectory at your coordinates…
What this means for your garden
Catalog plants sorted by how the climate shift between today and 2025 changes their fit. Annual-marked plants are excluded — the projection doesn't change their single-season nature.
Thriving right now
✓
English lavender
Lavandula angustifolia
Purple coneflower
Echinacea purpurea
Switchgrass
Panicum virgatum
Black-eyed Susan
Rudbeckia fulgida
Annabelle hydrangea
Hydrangea arborescens
Coral bells
Heuchera spp.
+235 more
Struggling at this year
✓→⚠
Paper birch
Betula papyrifera
Newly possible in your zone
✕→✓
Globe artichoke
Cynara scolymus
Pacific dogwood
Cornus nuttallii
Toyon
Heteromeles arbutifolia
Parry's agave
Agave parryi
Snapdragon
Antirrhinum majus
Dahlia
Dahlia (hybrid)
+4 more
Which future is this?
These projections use SSP3-7.0 — the regional-rivalry, high-emissions scenario that most closely matches the current global trajectory. It's not the worst case (SSP5-8.5), and it's not the optimistic case (SSP1-2.6). It's the honest middle.
Toggling between SSP1-2.6 / SSP3-7.0 / SSP5-8.5 lights up when the full CHELSA ingest runs (see methodology below). Until then, the default view is the realistic one.
How we derive these zones
For each grid cell, we take the annual minimum temperature in each year of the 30-year window, average those across the window, and map the result to a USDA half-zone using the standard 5 °F bands. The same math runs identically on the historical 1991-2020 climatology and on the CMIP6 projections — only the input data differs.
Years between the four anchor windows are interpolated linearly. Confidence widens as the projection moves further from the present — tight ensemble spread reads as likely, wider spread as uncertain or wide.
Primary source: CHELSA v2.1 (Swiss WSL, CC0 1.0). Zones are computed Plotwright-side, so this view stays independent of any single agency's published map. ADR 0007 and ADR 0009 record the choices.
Plotwright
Climate-aware plant planning — every plant checked against your zone now and in 2050.