Forest Genomics for Environmental Adaptation and Resilient Breeding: Landscape Genetics, Multi-Omics, and Conservation Strategies

Dear Colleagues,

Forests play a pivotal role in maintaining global biodiversity, ecosystem services, and carbon sequestration. However, rapid climate change has imposed unprecedented environmental pressures on forest ecosystems, threatening the survival, productivity, and adaptive capacity of many tree species. Over the past decades, advances in molecular genetics, population genomics, and high-throughput sequencing technologies have transformed our understanding of how forest trees respond and adapt to changing environments. The emergence of landscape genetics and landscape genomics has enabled researchers to link genetic variation with environmental gradients, providing new insights into local adaptation, evolutionary processes, and conservation strategies. These developments have laid the foundation for integrating genomic information into forest conservation, restoration, and breeding programs.

This Special Issue aims to highlight recent advances in forest genomics and their applications in understanding climate adaptation, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable forest management. We seek to bridge fundamental research on adaptive genetic variation with practical applications in conservation breeding and climate-resilient forest development. The issue welcomes studies that investigate the genetic basis of adaptation to environmental stresses, assess population responses to climate change, and develop genomic tools for the conservation and improvement of forest tree species.

Current cutting-edge insights in forest genomics include landscape genomics, genome-wide association studies (GWAS), genomic selection, adaptive variation analysis, pangenomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, and multi-omics integration. Emerging approaches such as environmental association analysis, machine-learning-assisted breeding, assisted gene flow, and climate-informed conservation planning are increasingly used to predict and enhance the adaptive potential of forest populations. Research combining genomic data with ecological, physiological, and climatic information is particularly valuable for understanding forest resilience under future climate scenarios.

We welcome original research articles, reviews, perspectives, and methodological papers addressing topics including, but not limited to:

• Forest population genomics and evolutionary genetics;
• Landscape genetics and landscape genomics;
• Climate adaptation and adaptive genetic variation in forest trees;
• Genomic basis of abiotic and biotic stress tolerance;
• Conservation genetics and genetic resource management;
• Conservation breeding and genomic-assisted breeding;
• Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and genomic selection (GS);
• Multi-omics approaches to forest adaptation;
• Assisted migration and assisted gene flow;
• Forest restoration under climate change;
• Biodiversity conservation and ecosystem resilience;
• Applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning in forest genetics and breeding.

Dr. Yingting Zhang
Prof. Dr. Yuanzheng Yue
Guest Editors

Dr. Hui Xia
Guest Editor Assistant

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.