What is adaptive capacity?
Climate change is rapidly altering landscapes and habitats, disrupting biological processes and stressing species. As the climate changes, some species are better equipped to cope than others. This ability to cope with or adjust to changing climatic conditions, either by staying in place and adapting to new conditions, or moving to track more suitable conditions, is referred to as a species’ adaptive capacity.
Why does it matter for climate adaptation?
Understanding a species’ adaptive capacity (AC) is a key factor in understanding its vulnerability to climate change. Researchers and resource managers look at species’ adaptive capacity, along with their exposure and sensitivity to climate change, to evaluate climate change vulnerability — an initial step in the adaptation planning process used to understand climate risks to species and help guide conservation decisions. Despite the important role adaptive capacity plays in conservation planning, the concept of AC has been difficult to apply in practice. Varying definitions and evaluation criteria related to adaptive capacity, and confusion distinguishing adaptive capacity from sensitivity, have created setbacks for managers trying to use AC to inform decision-making.
A New NW CASC Framework for Assessing Adaptive Capacity
Recognizing the need for better tools and methods to assess adaptive capacity, NW CASC researchers and a host of collaborators set to work on developing a new framework to help researchers and conservation practitioners incorporate AC into management practices. This team developed an attribute-based framework for evaluating adaptive capacity that can be applied to any species or system, along with guidelines to help natural resource managers use this framework in their conservation planning and decision-making. To create this framework, the research team reviewed existing literature and vulnerability assessment resources and drew from their diverse experiences in the fields of ecology, conservation biology, climate science and climate adaptation.
The framework, introduced in their recent paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, is graphically represented as an AC wheel, which includes 36 attributes for assessing AC, organized into seven categories of related characteristics: distribution, movement, evolutionary potential, ecological role, abiotic niche, life history and demography. The AC wheel also highlights twelve core attributes — representing characteristics that are particularly important and typically have widely available data — providing a thorough way to assess AC even when information for other attributes is limited. For each attribute, species can be evaluated on a “low–moderate–high” scale. Looking at a species’ level of adaptive capacity across all attributes can paint a clearer picture of its overall vulnerability.
In addition to being applicable across taxa and geographies, the AC wheel includes attributes that can be measured at both species and population levels, allowing flexibility to help inform decisions across spatial scales and jurisdictions.
Helping Managers Help Wildlife
This framework provides a detailed understanding of a species AC, which can directly support climate adaptation and conservation planning. The research team didn’t stop at developing this framework. They’ve published a follow-up paper in the journal Conservation Biology that links adaptive capacity assessments to on-the-ground management and have been working with state and federal management agencies in the Northwest region to demonstrate and implement the adaptive capacity framework on a diverse array of priority species. In collaboration with over 90 experts, they are completing adaptive capacity assessments for 40 priority species and are in the process of synthesizing those results. For each of these species, the project team is putting together summary reports to send to state and federal partners. The team is also organizing a workshop with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife this fall to talk about using the framework and results from the priority species’ assessments to inform climate adaptation planning.
The efforts described in this summary have been conducted through collaboration with many individuals representing state and federal agencies, universities and non-profits. The development of the adaptive capacity framework (introduced in the Frontiers paper) and the adaptive capacity menu (introduced in the Conservation Biology paper) represent different projects, both funded by the National CASC, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service. The Northwest CASC-funded project supported researchers in applying the AC framework to species in the Northwest. This NW CASC project is being led by Lindsey Thurman (USGS), Julian Olden (UW), Josh Lawler (UW), Jessica Halofsky (USDA NW Climate Hub), and Erik Beever (USGS NOROCK).
If you’d like to learn more about these efforts, please email Dr. Lindsey Thurman at lthurman@usgs.gov.