Building a Bridge Between Adaptive Capacity and Adaptive Potential to Understand Responses to Environmental Change

Adaptive capacity is a topic at the forefront of environmental change research with roots in both social, ecological, and evolutionary science. It is closely related to the evolutionary biology concept of adaptive potential. In this systematic literature review, we: (1) summarize the history of these topics and related fields; (2) assess relationship(s) between the concepts among disciplines and the use of the terms in climate change research, and evaluate methodologies, metrics, taxa biases, and the geographic scale of studies; and (3) provide a synthetic conceptual framework to clarify concepts. Bibliometric analyses revealed the terms have been used most frequently in conservation and evolutionary biology journals, respectively. There has been a greater growth in studies of adaptive potential than adaptive capacity since 2001, but a greater geographical extent of adaptive capacity studies. Few studies include both, and use is often superficial. Our synthesis considers adaptive potential as one process contributing to adaptive capacity of complex systems, notes “sociological” adaptive capacity definitions include actions aimed at desired outcome (i.e., policies) as a system driver whereas “biological” definitions exclude such drivers, and suggests models of adaptive capacity require integration of evolutionary and social–ecological system components.




(a) Raw count and (b) proportion of publications using the terms “conservation” and “adaptive potential” (AP, N = 150) or “adaptive capacity” (AC, N = 73) or both terms (N = 15) through time. Proportion was calculated as total number of papers from the search divided by the total number of papers published in the 10 most frequent journals for each term (excluding PLoS ONE) [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]



GEM3 author(s)
Year published
2021
Journal
Global Change Biology
DOI/URL
GEM3 component
Mechanisms
Modeling
Mentions grant
Yes