Desert species respond strongly to infrequent, intense pulses of precipitation. Consequently, indigenous flora has developed a rich repertoire of life-history strategies to deal with fluctuations in resource availability. Examinations of how future climate change will affect the biota often forecast negative impacts, but these—usually correlative—approaches overlook precipitation variation because they are based on
averages
. Here, we provide an overview of how variable precipitation affects perennial and annual desert plants, and then implement an innovative, mechanistic approach to examine the effects of precipitation on populations of two desert plant species. This approach couples robust climatic projections, including variable precipitation, with stochastic, stage-structured models constructed from long-term demographic datasets of the short-lived
Cryptantha flava
in the Colorado Plateau Desert (USA) and the annual
Carrichtera annua
in the Negev Desert (Israel). Our results highlight these populations' potential to buffer future stochastic precipitation. Population growth rates in both species increased under future conditions: wetter, longer growing seasons for
Cryptantha
and drier years for
Carrichtera
. We determined that such changes are primarily due to survival and size changes for
Cryptantha
and the role of seed bank for
Carrichtera
. Our work suggests that desert plants, and thus the resources they provide, might be more resilient to climate change than previously thought.
A demographic approach to study effects of climate change in desert plants
