Climate change literature across ecological disciplines: A review of the scope and level of specificity in management recommendations

Recognizing the vulnerability of natural systems to anthropogenic climate change, government agencies and private sector institutions have begun to incorporate climate change action planning into natural resource management practices. Because curating knowledge is the first step towards developing climate-adaptation strategies, it is important to highlight potential gaps in the scientific literature to identify research needs. Previous research had noted a lack of specificity in providing climate change management recommendations in some sub-fields of ecology—here, we evaluated whether the lack of actionable management recommendations (e.g., clear, well-defined activities) is broadly prevalent across disciplines, with particular attention to applied fields. We systematically reviewed 881 climate-change-related articles to determine whether the proportion of actionable management recommendations varies by taxon studied, ecosystem in which data collection occurred (e.g., forests vs. agricultural fields), continent on which data collection occurred, whether the study was experimental or observational, and spatial scale (e.g., spatial extent of data collection). Of the 1251 management recommendations we evaluated, most were classified as general principle (70.1%), rather than actionable (29.9%). General principles were consistently offered more often than actionable recommendations across all facets of ecology we investigated, indicating a common and widespread bias away from specificity in the current state of the literature. We also found an underrepresentation in the literature of some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and human populations to climate change. Our results suggest two potential courses of action: accept the ratio of actionable/general principle as it is currently, and direct focus to generating effective broad recommendations, or, if increasing immediate actionability is desired, restructure academic incentives to promote more specific management recommendations. We also suggest that, for a general management principle to be well-positioned for being adapted into an action, it should: (1) be valid across multiple spatial and temporal scales or be clear about its limitations, (2) anticipate, or at least explicitly consider, alterations to systems and communities under future climate change scenarios and provide alternative management strategies accordingly, and (3) incorporate and describe major sources of uncertainty in the management strategies.