Background: The definition of wildlife health continues to expand with the recognition that health is more than the absence of disease. As climate-associated impacts on wildlife health become inevitable, it is increasingly important to integrate concepts such as vulnerability, adaption, and resilience into wildlife health research, surveillance, and management actions. Here, we performed a scoping review to identify literature from 2008 onwards with a focus on climate change impacts on wildlife health. The literature fed into an AI-based thematic analysis which was used to describe the scope and depth of existing literature and identify key themes and knowledge gaps that are important to consider in future wildlife health frameworks. The themes identified in the analysis were then manually reviewed and refined by interpreting them in context.

Results: In total, 2,249 citations were retrieved from the literature search. After applying a set of inclusion/exclusion criteria, a total of 372 papers were retrieved and split into one of two groups: 1) papers focusing on climate-associated impacts on wildlife health and 2) papers focusing on climate-associated impacts on vector distribution. Thematic analyses were performed separately on each group although results from both groups identified aspects of the host as a top theme including immunological response, physiological stress response, and body size for group one and host population density, host-vector-pathogen interactions, and the importance of reservoir host species for group 2.

Conclusions: A large number of the papers retrieved in the literature search focused on how climate change impacts the distribution and abundance of host, vector, and pathogen species, remaining disease-centric in their approach. Themes related to potential management actions, with the exception of vector control, were found across only a limited number of papers reflecting some uncertainty on how best to respond and prepare for climate change as a threat to wildlife health.