The concept of ecological niches serves as a foundation for the use of ecological models to develop forest adaptive strategies to mitigate and adapt to a rapidly changing climate. Climate change is causing mismatches in climate niche of many tree species; thus, the existing forests might be left out of their climate niche and suffer from maladaptation. We introduced how niche-based models can help to develop forest adaptive strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change, with species occurrence based models at the species level, and genecology functions, transfer functions and response functions at the population level. We discussed the advantages and limitations of these tools. Although both geographic variables and climate variables can be used to develop transfer functions and genecology functions, climate variables have clear advantages over the geographic variables.