Supporting the adaptive capacity of species through more effective knowledge exchange with conservation practitioners

Abstract There is an imperative for conservation practitioners to help biodiversity adapt to accelerating environmental change. Evolutionary biologists are well‐positioned to inform the development of evidence‐based management strategies that support the adaptive capacity of species and ecosystems. Conservation practitioners increasingly accept that management practices must accommodate rapid environmental change, but harbour concerns about how to apply recommended changes to their management contexts. Given the interest from both conservation practitioners and evolutionary biologists in adjusting management practices, we believe there is an opportunity to accelerate the required changes by promoting closer collaboration between these two groups. We highlight how evolutionary biologists can harness lessons from other disciplines about how to foster effective knowledge exchange to make a substantive contribution to the development of effective conservation practices. These lessons include the following: (1) recognizing why practitioners do and do not use scientific evidence; (2) building an evidence base that will influence management decisions; (3) translating theory into a format that conservation practitioners can use to inform management practices; and (4) developing strategies for effective knowledge exchange. Although efforts will be required on both sides, we believe there are rewards for both practitioners and evolutionary biologists, not least of which is fostering practices to help support the long‐term persistence of species.


| INTRODUC TI ON
Unprecedented rates of environmental change have already led to significant impacts on the natural world (Díaz et al., 2019;Scheffers et al., 2016). The extent and pace of these changes mean that many species face extinction if they are not able to tolerate or adjust to changes in situ, shift their distributions to track more favourable conditions or evolve in response to changing conditions (Dawson et al., 2011;Quintero & Wiens, 2013). The potential to facilitate adaptation to climate change has stimulated interest in research identifying management strategies intended to reduce or ameliorate the impacts of environmental changes and strategies to enhance or support species' adaptive capacity (e.g. Beever et al., 2016;Prober et al., 2019). Adaptive capacity (Box 1) refers to the intrinsic ability of species to cope with or adjust to changing environmental conditions, including via genetic (i.e. evolutionary potential; Box 1) and/or phenotypic changes (phenotypic plasticity; Box 1).
Interest in using conservation management practices to support the adaptive capacity of species has driven attempts to distil the evidence base evaluating the conditions and contexts that promote or inhibit adaptation (e.g. Nicotra et al., 2015;Stockwell et al., 2003) and the attributes, traits and conditions that influence the levels of tolerance and degree of flexibility species display in their responses to change (e.g. Beever et al., 2017;Foden et al., 2013;Mimura et al., 2017). These efforts in turn have led to frameworks to evaluate the adaptive capacity of species (e.g. Thurman et al., 2020), and a proliferation of recommendations for actions and approaches to support species' responses to climate change (e.g. Broadhurst et al., 2017;LeDee et al., 2021).
Despite the theoretical evidence base amassed by documenting the processes by which species respond to change (Mimura et al., 2017;Stockwell et al., 2003), and the increasing number of management recommendations Crandall et al., 2000;Hendry et al., 2011;Smith et al., 2014) and decision support frameworks (e.g. Frankham et al., 2011;Hoffmann et al., 2021;Prober et al., 2015;Weeks et al., 2011), conservation practitioners (i.e. policy-makers and on-ground managers) remain uncertain about how to manage for the adaptive capacity of species and populations (Cook & Sgrò, 2018;Thurman et al., 2020). Particular areas of concern include how to determine if, when and where adaptive capacity is sufficient for a species to reduce extinction risk, how to recognize when a lack of adaptive capacity might be a risk for species and how to identify appropriate management actions to facilitate adaptation This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2021 The Authors. Evolutionary Applications published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. (Cook & Sgrò, 2018). These areas of apprehension point to the gap between the available science and the ability of practitioners to integrate this evidence into their management decisions; this gap constitutes a major barrier to achieving the required advancements to conservation practices (Beier et al., 2017).
The gap between science and practice when facilitating adaptation to climate change is emblematic of a broader problem of translating evolutionary biology into conservation policy and practice Cook & Sgrò, 2017;Kinnison et al., 2007;Smith et al., 2014). For decades, evolutionary biologists have been highlighting how evolutionary theory can inform effective conservation practices (e.g. Carroll et al., 2014;Crandall et al., 2000;Frankel & Soule, 1981;Frankham, 2005;Futuyma, 1995;Hendry et al., 2011;Smith et al., 2014). However, progress has been slow in changing conservation practices to account for evolutionary principles and processes (Cook & Sgrò, 2018). Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists continue to warn that well-established management practices may do more harm than good (e.g. treating fragmented populations as separate management units, Bell et al., 2019;Weeks et al., 2016;or prioritizing local seed provenances in restoration, Broadhurst et al., 2008;Prober et al., 2015) and that there is a need to change prevailing management paradigms (Prober et al., 2019;Ralls et al., 2018).
Practitioners report a range of barriers to modifying their management practices, many of which could be addressed through better collaboration between evolutionary biologists and practitioners (Cook & Sgrò, 2018;Ridley & Alexander, 2016). Building on existing efforts to translate evolutionary theory into practical guidelines for management (e.g. Frankham et al., 2011;Hoffmann et al., 2021;Prober et al., 2015;Sgrò et al., 2011), we believe progress could be accelerated by drawing on lessons for successful knowledge exchange that have been developed by other disciplines (Cook et al., 2013;Enquist et al., 2017;Norström et al., 2020). Facilitating evidence-based decisions requires tools and strategies that foster collaboration between scientists and practitioners, increase access to credible and relevant evidence (Sutherland et al., 2004), support practitioners to interpret evidence for their management context (Cook et al., 2013) and promote the two-way communication needed for practitioners and researchers to learn from one another (Norström et al., 2020;Ridley & Alexander, 2016;Safford et al., 2017). These tools and strategies have been developed over decades

BOX 1 Glossary of terms
Adaptive capacity: the ability of species or populations to intrinsically cope with or adjust to environmental change, either through genetic changes, phenotypic plasticity and/or dispersal.
Adaptive management: a structured and iterative process for decision-making that has the goal of reducing uncertainty over time, via monitoring and updating knowledge as part of ongoing learning.
Assisted colonization: human relocation of individuals to sites where the species does not currently occur or has not been known to occur in recent history. A sub-category of 'assisted migration'.
Assisted gene flow: the intentional translocation of individuals within the range of a species to facilitate adaptation to anticipated local conditions. Also called 'gene-pool mixing'.
Assisted migration: the practice of moving plants or animals to new locations either within or outside of their species range, often to match organisms with their historic climates as global warming occurs. Also termed 'managed relocation', 'assisted dispersal', 'assisted colonization'.
Boundary organization: an institution that plays an intermediary role between scientists and decision-makers, including by commissioning research, facilitating communication between scientists and practitioners, and translating existing evidence into contextspecific knowledge.
Evolutionary potential: the capacity for populations to respond to selection pressures through genetic changes. Also referred to as 'evolutionary adaptive capacity' or 'adaptive potential'.
Genetic rescue: restoring gene flow into small, isolated population to reverse negative fitness consequences.
Knowledge broker: an individual who plays an intermediary role between scientists and decision-makers, assisting scientists to understand the management context and research needs of practitioners and assisting practitioners to interpret the relevant science for their management contexts.
Knowledge co-production: a collaborative process to generating knowledge that involves practitioners and scientists working together from a project's inception to frame the problem, generate context-specific knowledge and identify pathways to achieve objectives.
Phenotypic plasticity: the range of phenotypes (the physical expression of genotypes) that a given genetic individual can express as a function of environment.
Risk assessment framework: a decision support process that identified and evaluates the factors that influence the chance of positive or negative outcomes associated with a management action.
Translational science: intentional processes in which scientists, stakeholders, and decision-makers work together to develop ecological research via joint consideration of the social, ecological, and political contexts of a problem. by large, transdisciplinary communities of practice working to bridge the gap between science and practice and promote the integration of evidence into management decisions.
As a collective of conservation and evolutionary biologists and practitioners, our goal for this paper is to detail how general lessons from knowledge exchange can be used to support better integration of evolutionary theory into conservation management, with a particular focus on supporting the adaptive capacity of species and populations. These lessons include the following: (1) recognizing why practitioners do and do not use evidence; (2) considering how to build an evidence base that will influence management decisions; (3) understanding how to translate evolutionary theory into a form that conservation practitioners can use to inform management practices; and (4) developing strategies for effective knowledge exchange to support the required changes to management.

| LE SSON 1 -RECOG NIZING WHY PR AC TITI ONER S DO AND DO NOT US E SCIENTIFIC E VIDEN CE
Research seeking to understand why a gap exists between conservation science and practice has revealed a wide range of barriers to the use of scientific evidence (Cvitanovic et al., 2015;Esler et al., 2010;Fabian et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2013). Many of these barriers revolve around practitioners being able to access relevant and credible evidence and apply it to their management context (Walsh Another barrier to the use of scientific evidence by practitioners is the mismatch between the research conducted (e.g. documenting threats) and the knowledge practitioners need for decision-making (e.g. identifying effective solutions), even for highly applied disciplines like restoration ecology and invasion biology (Beever et al., 2019;Esler et al., 2010;Fazey et al., 2005;Young & Van Aarde, 2011). Research aimed at encouraging practitioners to support species' adaptive capacity must likewise transition from documenting the negative impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems (Scheffers et al., 2016) to investigating the effectiveness of proposed management strategies to increase evolutionary potential  (Cook & Sgrò, 2018). Instead, working with practitioners to support adaptive management (Box 1) or to involve them in research that demonstrates how changing management practices will lead to better conservation outcomes will provide more compelling evidence (see Lesson 2).
A commonly perceived barrier to the use of scientific evidence in conservation is that practitioners are apprehensive about F I G U R E 1 Models of knowledge exchange that depict the relationships amongst practitioners, researchers and through individuals (knowledge brokers) or groups (boundary organizations) that act as intermediaries. *Knowledge brokers can be embedded within research teams or independent organizations. Adapted from Cvitanovic et al. (2015) PracƟƟoners Researchers Intermediary Knowledge brokers* Co-producƟon of knowledge Boundary organisaƟons

Embedded researchers
interpreting studies written for academic audiences (Sunderland et al., 2009). This disinclination likely constitutes a significant problem for two-way communication between evolutionary biologists and conservation practitioners, given that the two groups have lexicons that include a litany of terms that are neither intuitive nor always consistently defined (Ridley & Alexander, 2016). Conservation practitioners report that evolutionary principles are often not included within traditional natural resource management curricula (Cook & Sgrò, 2018) and that they have little training in how to apply principles from evolution and genetics to their management decisions (Cook & Sgrò, 2019). Insufficient exposure to evolutionary theory can make it difficult for practitioners to identify and critically evaluate relevant research and to determine how it can be applied to various management situations. Concepts such as adaptive capacity are multifaceted (Thurman et al., 2020), which makes it challenging for practitioners to operationalize broad recommendations.
Therefore, to promote changes to management practice, evolutionary biologists need to collaborate with practitioners to build their knowledge of important evolutionary concepts  and ensure that research findings are clearly articulated and directly applicable to management contexts (Beier et al., 2017;Enquist et al., 2017;Ridley & Alexander, 2016).
Beyond the challenges mentioned above, there are pragmatic reasons why scientific evidence may not be used in decision-making.
Management decisions occur within social, political and economic contexts, which can restrict practitioners' ability to implement best practices (Norström et al., 2020;Sutherland et al., 2004). Social and political constraints on management decisions can be an impediment to managing for adaptive capacity, wherein for example, assisted gene flow (Box 1) and assisted migration (Box 1) are controversial management strategies (Aitken & Whitlock, 2013;Lawler & Olden, 2011;Schwartz et al., 2012). There are also legislative and regulatory barriers to implementing some strategies, such as listing sub-species, distinct population segments or 'management units' as separate entities for protection (Weeks et al., 2016) and hybrids having uncertain legal status . Other practical barriers include spatial mismatches, wherein place-based management occurs at local geographic scales (e.g. protected areas), yet adaptive capacity needs to be managed at broader landscape scales, often across jurisdictional boundaries and different land tenures (Beever et al., 2014;Cook & Sgrò, 2018). Working with practitioners, evolutionary biologists can better understand the socio-ecological contexts and practical constraints on management decision and propose solutions that can be implemented within realistic management settings (Enquist et al., 2017;Fazey et al., 2005;Folke et al., 2005;Norström et al., 2020). For example, although the costs of genomic data continue to fall (Breed et al., 2019), genetic monitoring across multiple populations, over several generations will only be feasible for a small number of species. Overcoming barriers to managing for adaptive capacity may require evolutionary biologists to also engage with high-level policy-makers and key stakeholders, as conservation biologists have often done (e.g. reintroducing keystone species: grey wolves in Yellowstone; Smith et al., 2003), to help shape the political landscape for practitioners.

| LE SSON 2 -BU ILD ING AN E VIDEN CE BA S E THAT WILL INFLUEN CE MANAG EMENT DECIS IONS
In calling for practitioners to manage the adaptive capacity of species, evolutionary biologists are proposing a major shift from a default position of 'no action' to a more proactive approach of actively managing genetic diversity Ralls et al., 2018;Stockwell et al., 2003). For example, practitioners have typically been taught that gene-pool mixing can disrupt local adaptation and erode genetic uniqueness (Moritz, 1999), but are learning that wholesale avoidance of this approach may compromise the persistence of small, fragmented populations (Weeks et al., 2016;Whiteley et al., 2015).
Conservation practitioners harbour concerns about the potential negative outcomes associated with actively managing genetic diversity (e.g. outbreeding depression, disease risk; Cook & Sgrò, 2018) and want to understand the contexts in which strategies like genetic rescue (Box 1) and assisted migration will yield benefits-questions without easy answers (Bell et al., 2019;Ridley & Alexander, 2016;Tallmon et al., 2004). It is therefore necessary to work with practitioners to provide clear guidance for the circumstances under which current management practices are harmful (Prober et al., 2015;Weeks et al., 2016), and when new approaches will achieve better conservation outcomes (Bell et al., 2019;Etterson et al., 2020;Frankham, 2016;Weeks et al., 2017). Although considerably more difficult than for laboratory-based studies, building an evidence base that demonstrates benefits outside of model organisms, over multi- Although an important step forward, practitioners require support to apply these frameworks to their decision contexts (Cook & Sgrò, 2019; see Lesson 4). More field studies that evaluate and expand decision support frameworks, and identify the factors or contexts that most strongly mediate the outcomes of a strategy to support adaptive capacity, could also prove helpful for practitioners.
Researchers often struggle to help practitioners make sense of apparently contradictory scientific findings. To help address this challenge, several fields, including health sciences, social welfare, education (Davies & Boruch, 2001), have adopted approaches to synthesize existing information generated by individual studies or reviews, to identify which practices work well and under what circumstances (Dicks et al., 2014;Pullin & Knight, 2001). Identifying and collating relevant studies that evaluate the effectiveness of management interventions under a wide range of contexts can be used to assess overall patterns (Pullin et al., 2016). There are many approaches to evidence synthesis, some involving meta-analysis (Gurevitch et al., 2001) to assess the impact of effect modifiers on the effectiveness of an intervention, and some using more qualitative assessments of the weight of evidence . The value of this strategy has been demonstrated by conservation practitioners being willing to change their management practices when presented with a synthesis of the available evidence base (Walsh et al., 2015). Therefore, increasing the number of individual studies that address questions of when and how to promote adaptive capacity, conducted under a wide range of realistic conditions, would help build an evidence base that could support widespread changes to management practices.
Growing the evidence base for best-practice management of adaptive capacity could be assisted by helping practitioners formulate interventions as hypotheses and to implement management actions as an experiment (e.g. adaptive management, Walters & Holling, 1990)  have been used to document strategies to promote adaptive capacity (e.g. landscape restoration projects and seed provenance trials; Broadhurst et al., 2008). This approach would be particularly useful in identifying when a lack of adaptive capacity may be a threat to long-term persistence, and whether actions to promote adaptive capacity have been successful. Working closely with practitioners in this way can be critical, given that management decisions tend to occur over shorter timescales than required to demonstrate the benefits of supporting adaptive capacity (Prober et al., 2019), although not always (e.g. Hendry et al., 2011;Weeks et al., 2017).

| LE SSON 3 -TR AN S L ATING THEORY INTO A FORMAT THAT CON S ERVATI ON PR AC TITI ONER S C AN US E TO INFORM MANAG EMENT PR AC TI CE S
Evolutionary theory can provide insights into the characteristics that influence a species' ability to respond to selective forces, which are relevant to conservation management . A key challenge is packaging those insights so they effectively inform management practices (Enquist et al., 2017;Safford et al., 2017). A robust theoretical foundation may be perceived by researchers as compelling evidence, but practitioners may not appreciate the caveats and context-dependencies that determine when applying these general rules is appropriate (Beier et al., 2017).

F I G U R E 2
A robust evidence base to support successful management practices, based on an incremental scaling up in spatial extent and ecological complexity, from studies of model organisms to studies documenting changes in whole ecosystems

Community-level experiments tes ng management interven ons in natural systems
Species-specific studies in natural systems

Model organisms
Species-specific studies in laboratory se ngs

Community-level experiments in laboratory se ngs
This uncertainty can be paralysing for practitioners tasked with interpreting general rules (Tallmon et al., 2004).
In attempting to bridge the gap between science and practice, evolutionary biologists must walk a difficult line in ensuring advice is sufficiently general to be applied widely (i.e. risk assessment frameworks; Frankham et al., 2011), while also recognizing and accounting for the complex realities of local conditions (Aitken & Whitlock, 2013;Bell et al., 2019;Hendry, 2016). Rules of thumb (e.g. adaptive diversity is associated with environmental gradients; Sgrò et al., 2011) and generalized risk assessments (e.g. probability of outbreeding depression; Frankham et al., 2011) can be of great value in determining when to consider supporting adaptive capacity. How to implement these rules in practice is a more nuanced question that practitioners may need support to answer. For example, the general rule that one migrant per generation will maintain genetic diversity assumes that the migrant successfully reproduces (Wang, 2004).
Likewise, maintaining an effective population size (N e ) of >1000 to maintain evolutionary potential (Frankham et al., 2014) requires understanding the relationship between N and N e , which can vary widely amongst species and across different environments and the spatial scale at which N e is evaluated (Frankham, 1995;Palstra & Fraser, 2012).
With a proliferation of management recommendations (Crandall et al., 2000;Hendry et al., 2011;Kinnison et al., 2007;Stockwell et al., 2003), the risk is that practitioners assume advice can only be provided on the basis of extensive data and that management problems require bespoke solutions. Practitioners need to know when rules of thumb can be applied, and when additional data are required to make decisions. The advice that genomic data can help tailor recommendations to specific management contexts (Breed et al., 2019) needs to be accompanied by caveats around the acquisition and analysis of genomic data. For instance, distinguishing between neutral and adaptive diversity in genomic data requires associated fitness data (Hoffmann et al., 2015) to understand the genetic differences that reflect the diversity on which selection can act, rather than those that may be signatures of genetic drift (Weeks et al., 2016). Guidelines are lacking that can help practitioners understand when genomic data are required to inform decisions, and how to collect and use these data to develop strategies to support evolutionary potential. This is where two-way communication between scientists and practitioners can help to formulate the questions that need to be addressed (Enquist et al., 2017;Ridley & Alexander, 2016). Other decision support tools used in conservation, such as structured decision-making and adaptive management (reviewed in Schwartz et al., 2018), but tailored to evolutionary challenges, could make a significant difference in supporting practitioners to accommodate uncertainty in decisions.
As the number of studies assessing strategies to support adaptive capacity increase, and evidence documenting management experiments grows, synthesizing that evidence base can reveal when rules of thumb apply and the contexts in which alternative approaches are more effective (see Lesson 2). Although practitioners are willing to change their practices on the basis of new evidence (Walsh et al., 2015), there is no one-size-fits-all approach to evidence-based decision-making . Issues of credibility and legitimacy can be highly influential in the evidence practitioners trust and use, making relationships between scientists and practitioners important for successful knowledge exchange (Beier et al., 2017;Cook et al., 2013;Enquist et al., 2017).

| LE SSON 4 -DE VELOPING S TR ATEG IE S FOR EFFEC TIVE K NOWLEDG E E XCHANG E
Changing management paradigms is not easy, and practitioners face significant environmental challenges and limited resources.
Management strategies are often reactive, focussed on short-term outcomes (e.g. suppressing threats), whereas longer-term outcomes can require more proactive strategies that promote functional and Two-way knowledge exchange between scientists and practitioners is integral to evidence-based decision-making, because it increases the capacity of practitioners to understand the science, and builds the capacity of scientists to comprehend management challenges and contexts needed to formulate effective recommendations (Cook et al., 2013;Enquist et al., 2017;Norström et al., 2020; Panel 1). The benefits of engaging with practitioners to conduct management experiments extend beyond building the evidence base (Lesson 2), but can also offer researchers opportunities to conduct field-based studies and train early-career researchers. Participatory, practice-oriented research that creates management-research alliances (e.g. co-production of knowledge; Figure 1, Box 1) enable scientists and practitioners to cooperatively develop effective strategies to address critical management challenges (Cvitanovic et al., 2015;Swart et al., 2014). Involving practitioners in formulating research questions can be a powerful way to draw on their knowledge about the systems they manage, understand the constraints on management decisions and ensure that proposed management alternatives can be critically evaluated and implemented (Beier et al., 2017).  Hendry et al., 2011). Determining what the real versus perceived knowledge gaps are for best-practice management of adaptive capacity is an important first step (Beier et al., 2017). This is one area where individuals working at the interface of science and practice (e.g. knowledge brokers; Figure 1) and groups whose roles are to span the research-action boundary (e.g. boundary organizations; Figure 1) can be critical (Hallett et al., 2017;Safford et al., 2017). Organizations, like the US Geological Survey's National • IniƟate discussions between scienƟsts and pracƟƟoners well in advance of planned translocaƟons. • Recognize that managers may seek advice from researchers with whom they have exisƟng, trusted relaƟonships, and collaboraƟons may take Ɵme to form. • ScienƟsts may need to advocate for translocaƟons to take place (e.g., raising concerns about inbreeding depression, highlighƟng the mis-match between historical and predicted rates of environmental change) to overcome risk aversion or insƟtuƟonal inerƟa. • Maintain a dialogue throughout the process, ensuring expectaƟons, roles and responsibiliƟes are explicitly discussed. • Discuss expectaƟons for providing internal, management-focused reports and publishing findings in the peer-review literature.
HypotheƟcal scenario: ScienƟsts have idenƟfied that an isolated but important populaƟon of a threatened species is in decline. In seeking to engage with the management agency, the following consideraƟons could be important in idenƟfying a way forward: Applying the lessons for supporƟng effecƟve knowledge exchange to conservaƟon translocaƟon efforts .

Lesson 1:
• LegislaƟon could be a barrier to translocaƟons when populaƟons are listed as management units or sub-species. • Source populaƟons may be limited and also of conservaƟon concern, and managers must consider how translocaƟons impact source populaƟons. • Budget cycles may not align with ecological Ɵmeframes, making the Ɵming of translocaƟons sub-opƟmal. • Where populaƟons cross jurisdicƟonal borders, it may be necessary to engage and coordinate with mulƟple management organizaƟons, operaƟng under different legal instruments and policies.

Lesson 2:
• Collect data on the geneƟc structure of potenƟal source and recipient populaƟons to provide the agency with different translocaƟon opƟons. • Combine geneƟc data with fitness data to inform discussion of the consequences of inbreeding depression.

Lesson 3:
• Facilitate a discussion with managers about the different management alternaƟves -e.g., regular small translocaƟons, single larger translocaƟon from mulƟple source populaƟons. • Help managers understand the risks of failing to act, as well as those associated with taking acƟon. • Explain the contexts in which the recommended course of acƟon may change (e.g., a polygynous versus monogamous maƟng system might influence the sex raƟo of individuals moved). • Help idenƟfy appropriate proxies for geneƟc diversity (e.g., the presence of an environmental gradient) when the ideal data are not available.
Foundation. This programme has funded over 100 projects to implement and evaluate climate adaption actions, with project teams that often involve collaborations between practitioners and academic researchers (Cross et al., 2018).
Another strategy that can be highly effective at influencing management practices is to embed scientists within management agencies and conservation organizations (Figure 1), where they act as a bridge between science and practice (Cook et al., 2013). When scientists trained in evolutionary biology work from within agencies to help navigate the decision space, they can help build the capacity of practitioners and shape conservation policy within their institutions (Roux et al., 2019). We know of some very effective examples of embedding evolutionary biologists and population geneticists, who facilitate a culture of supporting management-relevant research and integrating evolutionary theory into decision-making. However, in many places this strategy is under-utilized, with neither evolutionary biologists nor often ecologists employed within management agencies (Roux et al., 2019). As the pace of environmental change accelerates, and more radical approaches to management are required to conserve biodiversity, evolutionary biologists can help shape the conservation policies required to facilitate species' adaptive capacity. To achieve actionable research, a strong emphasis on translational science (Box 1) that facilitates collaboration between scientists and practitioners is needed (Beier et al., 2017;Enquist et al., 2017).

| CON CLUS IONS
Practitioners are open to changing their management practices to support the adaptive capacity of species, but they need help to achieve the required shift in accepted methods, policies and practices.
Despite arguably having less of a history of engaging with conservation practitioners (Smith & Bernatchez, 2008), evolutionary biologists can help address existing information gaps and facilitate changes to management practices. There are well-acknowledged challenges for incentivizing and funding translational science (Norström et al., 2020), although climate change is providing an imperative for funders, governments and nongovernment agencies whose missions are to support biodiversity (Cross et al., 2018;Enquist et al., 2017). The lessons from decades of efforts to bridge the gap between science and practice outlined here could support evolutionary biologists and practitioners to build the capacity of species and ecosystems to adapt to environmental change. Practical steps towards better engagement between evolutionary biologists and practitioners include working together to document the outcomes of management, conducting research in management-relevant contexts, synthesizing evidence to identify general lessons and developing tools to help practitioners interpret when to apply those rules to their specific contexts. Effective knowledge exchange between evolutionary biologists and practitioners will require efforts on both sides and is essential to achieving the changes required to conserve biodiversity and the evolutionary processes generating it.

K E Y WO R DS
adaptive capacity, conservation management, evidence-based conservation, evolutionary adaptive capacity, knowledge exchange, natural resource management

ACKOWLED G EM ENTS
We thank the participants of a co-production workshop that in-