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Endophytic fungi inhabit the leaf tissues of all living plants where they can buffer or exacerbate plant responses to climate change. Because many of these fungi have only recently been discovered and sequenced, the independent and interactive responses of plants and their fungal symbionts to a warming climate is an area of active research. Here we describe a conceptual framework linking the range of phenotypic plasticity and rates of shifts in community composition of each symbiont (plants and fungal leaf endophytes) to overall changes in abundance of each organism in a 26-year-long warming experiment in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. In this system, leaf endophytic fungi exhibit large plasticity in growth rates in response to experimental warming in the laboratory, but no shifts in composition after 26 years of warming in the field. Instead, fungal composition in the field changed in response to plant species …