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Assisted migration is increasingly being considered as a potential climate change adaptation tactic even though it also comes with potential risk to ecosystems and society. When implementing conservation actions that involve risk, it is prudent to have policies and guidelines to ensure that such actions are conducted in ways that conform to regional standards and consider risks. Here, we report on a policy scan focused on assisted migration in the context of climate change adaptation originally as a protected areas tactic only, but then broadened to ecosystems in Canada beyond those boundaries. Policy scans are a useful strategy for understanding the evolving policy and regulatory landscape for a given topic and can guide the development of such policies in other jurisdictions. Our scan focused on Canada, where multi-scalar governance systems exist relevant to biodiversity and environmental management. Our comprehensive policy scan (involving scans of legislation, policies, and guidelines found online and through direct inquiries with government bodies) revealed major gaps in the assisted migration policy landscape with very few provincial/territorial or federal policies in Canada. A more rudimentary scan in the United States revealed a similar pattern. There was evidence that some jurisdictions anticipated need for such policies and even a few examples of very specific policies (e.g., seeds) that had already been developed, but there were not comprehensive policies or frameworks. Governments and other relevant bodies/organizations may wish to consider working collaboratively toward the development of robust, evidence-based policies for assisted migration given that we anticipate this conservation intervention becoming more popular as climate change impacts on ecosystems become more evident and dire.

Despite great promise for understanding the impacts and extent of climate change and extreme weather events on aquatic animals, their species, and ecological communities, it is surprising that electronic tagging and tracking tools, like biotelemetry and biologging, have not been extensively used to understand climate change or develop and evaluate potential interventions that may help adapt to its impacts. In this review, we provide an overview of methodologies and study designs that leverage available electronic tracking tools to investigate aspects of climate change and extreme weather events in aquatic ecosystems. Key interventions to protect aquatic life from the impacts of climate change, including habitat restoration, protected areas, conservation translocations, mitigations against interactive effects of climate change, and simulation of future scenarios, can all be greatly facilitated by using electronic tagging and tracking. We anticipate that adopting animal tracking to identify phenotypes, species, or ecosystems that are vulnerable or resilient to climate change will help in applying management interventions such as fisheries management, habitat restoration, invasive species control, or enhancement measures that prevent extinction and strengthen the resilience of communities against the most damaging effects of climate change. Given the scalability and increasing accessibility of animal tracking tools for researchers, tracking individual organisms will hopefully also facilitate research into effective solutions and interventions against the most extreme and acute impacts on species, populations, and ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent declines of Yukon River Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) populations have severely impacted people residing in the Yukon and Alaska. Evidence-based conservation strategies focused on stock recovery and adaptation are urgently needed but are limited by our understanding of what is driving declines, particularly in Canadian portions of the Yukon River basin. We examined how multiple environmental drivers may be influencing Canadian-origin Yukon River Chinook salmon productivity for eight populations over a 28-year period. We found that productivity was related to various environmental and ecosystem processes acting cumulatively over multiple life stages and across broad geographic scales. Productivity decreased in association with warmer upriver migration temperatures, wetter freshwater juvenile rearing habitats, and increasing abundances of potential marine competitors. In contrast, productivity increased in years with warmer and snowier winters and earlier spring onset. We found that different populations had similar relationships with environmental drivers, with potentially negative implications for regional fisheries stability. Our findings provide insight into how Chinook salmon are responding to rapid environmental change and can help inform salmon conservation initiatives and sustainable harvest strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]