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Ecological restorationists working to restore species and habitats must make decisions about how to monitor the effectiveness of their actions. In order to do this, they must determine historical baselines for populations by measuring and monitoring reference habitat sites: analog ecological systems that act as controls for comparison. Yet as climate change alters what is possible in terms of habitat restoration, drawing baselines for recovery has become fraught with difficulty. This article examines the epistemic and legal practices of baseline-setting in the case of the Columbia River Basin as well as the ways that ecological restorationists are dealing with the shifting baselines of a climate-changed river. Restorationists do this by altering their epistemic practices, using trained judgment and establishing alternative, anticipatory baselines. While the field of restoration was born out of the idea that environmental repair was about looking to the past, the discipline has transformed to look forward and even to anticipate the future. One way that this is occurring is through re-thinking baselines to reflect emerging environmental and sociotechnical imaginaries, which are enacted through epistemic practice. Anticipatory practices such as baseline-setting help sensitize the field of restoration ecology to the future, while at the same time facilitating the emergence of ideas that will enable scientifically based decision-making to continue to occur within a high level of uncertainty. 

This article explores how scientists adapt to a changing climate. To do this, we bring examples from a case study of salmon habitat restorationists in the Columbia River Basin into conversation with concepts from previous work on change and stability in knowledge infrastructures and scientific practice. In order to adapt, ecological restorationists are increasingly relying on predictive modeling tools, as well as initiating broader changes in the interdisciplinary nature of the field of ecological restoration itself. We explore how the field of ecological restoration is shifting its conceptual gaze from restoring to past, historic baselines to anticipating a no-analog future and consider what this means in terms of understanding the adaptive capacity of knowledge infrastructures and epistemic communities more broadly. We argue that identifying how scientists themselves conceptualize drivers of change and respond to these changes is an important step in understanding what adaptive capacity in science might entail. We offer these examples as a provocation for thinking about “adaptive epistemologies” and how adaptation by scientists themselves can facilitate or hinder particular environmental or sociotechnical futures.