An introduction to the AdapTree project for the general public
- Forests provide thousands of jobs and billions of dollars worth of employment income, tax revenue, and economic activity to Canadians. In addition, they provide a broad range of ecosystem services including water, recreation, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration.
- All of these benefits depend on healthy forests. Climate change is threatening forest health.Tree populations, adapted to specific climatic areas, are becoming mismatched as climate changes.
- The change is happening too fast for tree populations to adjust through selection of the fittest and migration as they have done over the past millennia.
- In BC and Alberta, about 150 million spruce and lodgepole pine trees are planted annually by forest companies and provincial agencies. Typically, foresters collect and use seed locally for this planting. In the past, the resulting seedlings were well-adapted to the locations in which they were planted. However, a rapidly changing climate threatens forest health and productivity, and is predicted to result in widespread maladaptation of trees.
|Phenotyping: Large numbers of plants are being phenotyped in six environments including a greenhouse, out door nursery beds, and 4 controlled environment growth chambers.
|Observed adaptive traits are: growth, bud break, bud set, cold hardiness, drought hardiness, carbon isotope composition.
SOME MEMBERS OF OUR RESEARCH TEAM