The red-backed salamander, Plethodon cinereus, is a common woodland amphibian that is found throughout much of eastern North America. The species is important to forest ecological processes, and changes in their population density are often used to measure the impacts of forest management, pollution, and environmental change. Therefore, consistent methods of density estimation are required. In the first chapter, I review spatial capture-recapture, a modern modeling tool that incorporates spatial information to reliably estimate population density without the need for the ad-hoc methods that render other density estimates incomparable. It can also be used to make inferences on space-use, population dynamics, and connectivity. I then demonstrate the versatility of spatial capture-recapture using P. cinereus mark-recapture data collected from my study sites in central Pennsylvania. For the second chapter of this thesis, I use spatial capture-recapture and other modeling approaches to test hypotheses about P. cinereus climate change adaptive capacity. This salamander is a convenient model for understanding dispersal-limited species, so I tested eight hypotheses to see how behavioral plasticity and fitness were affected by climate variability. Based on previous evidence, I also tested whether a common color polymorphism is a useful visual cue for predicting within-population variation in climate tolerances. Using four years of mark-recapture information from Maryland, I found the color morph is not a useful indicator, but overall, the population did show strong climate preferences, indicating that population persistence could be threatened by warmer and drier conditions predicted in the future.