A persistent obstacle to implementing climate adaptation has been that guidance for wildlife management and conservation tends to be generic or mismatched to the actual decision space and authority of most wildlife managers. The Wildlife Adaptation Menu addresses a longstanding need by delivering a comprehensive and structured catalog of adaptation actions for managing wildlife populations as well as wildlife habitat. The Wildlife Adaptation Menu has already been used on four national forests in the Eastern Region and by managers to launch dozens of real-world climate adaptation projects.

Climate change is a significant threat for wildlife around the world, but wildlife managers have had difficulty applying climate change adaptation in their daily work. The Northern Research Station and Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science (NIACS) led a collaborative project with researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, and University of Wisconsin to address this challenge. Researchers published a literature review, “Preparing Wildlife for Climate Change: How Far Have We Come?”, that evaluated thousands of published climate adaptation recommendations for wildlife management. The paper was one of the top 10 most downloaded articles from the Journal of Wildlife Management during the past year, and it highlighted the fact that research on climate change adaptation for wildlife has been weighted toward a narrow set of ideas, such as protected area management. With publication of the Wildlife Adaptation Menu, researchers deliver a more complete and balanced collection of plausible adaptation actions. The menu contains diverse ideas, covering topics like population genetics, wildlife diseases, and engaging human communities in wildlife conservation. The Wildlife Adaptation Menu is being used on the Chippewa, Ottawa, Superior, and Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forests. It has been presented in four workshops, and it is helping wildlife managers develop their own concrete actions to cope with changing conditions.