Climate-Related Adaptive Genetic Variation and Population Structure in Forests

Dear Colleagues,

Adaptation to local environments will be a challenging issue for forests in the face of global climate changes. While other organisms have the choice of migrating to a better suited habitat, the current rate of climate change can be too fast for forest trees, which will have the only choice of locally adapting. Therefore, the knowledge of genetic adaptive traits is an essential support to actions in forest management and conservation.

Many approaches are now available to do this, from “classical” studies of association between some loci and environmental variables, carried also to a genomic scale by the use of SNPs arrays, to more sophisticated modeling, such as those used in landscape genetics/genomics, to Bayesian analyses aimed at unravelling the confounding effect of demography and population genetic structure, so as not to impact on the assessment of adaptive variation.

Further, information on the relationship between genetic variation and environmental variation is necessary to implement bioclimatic models to simulate how the present genetic variation will be shaped by a changing environment and to identify current and projected distribution of forest species. This aspect will also benefit from the validation of genetic and phenotypic associations under controlled environments.

The information obtained from different approaches can lead to the identification of genotypes adapted to future climatic conditions, to select seed sources and populations for planning sound conservation strategies like assisted migration or assisted range expansion, to help forest tree species to cope with fast-changing climatic conditions and prevent localized declines.

The threat to forests represented by imminent climate changes requires immediate countermeasures; because of this, we deem that a journal issue devoted to “Climate-Related Adaptive Genetic Variation and Population Structure in Forests” will be of general interest to many colleagues.

Prof. Giorgio Binelli
Guest Editor

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