Climate adaptation of forest trees for an uncertain future

Climate adaptation is an important challenge for future forests with rapidly altering growing conditions that may cause tree maladaptation leading to reduced growth, increased risk of damage and mortality. Several adaptation approaches exist like changed management systems, selection of new tree species, mixing species, etc. but in this seminar, we will focus on how we can utilize knowledge of tree adaptive properties, or intraspecific variation, as a tool for climate adaptation. Knowledge of intraspecific variation can be used to develop models to predict tree performance when transferred to new climatic conditions. These models can then be used to pro-actively deploy seedlings to new sites and regions where they better match the future climate, so called assisted migration.

We will analyze and discuss different tree adaptive properties such as local adaptation and phenotypic plasticity and present how models for assisted migration have been developed. Furthermore, we will show how such models can be implemented into decision support tools for genetically improved material used in practical forestry. We will also highlight the challenges ahead, such as model prediction performance in a much warmer climate and uncertainty of the magnitude of climate change. 

Register

Please register latest Friday 20 October by sending an email to haleh.hayatgheibi@slu.se and state whether you would like to attend on-site or if you would like a Teams link.