Climate change is impacting forest health and productivity. Trees will be poorly adapted to their future environment if we stick to the status quo practice of using seed from local populations for reforestation. The goals of this project are: (1) to use genomic tools combined with experiments to testing trees’ resistance to heat, cold, drought stress, and disease to develop better reforestation options for Douglas-fir, lodgepole pine, western larch and jack pine, and (2) assess whether these forest adaptation strategies and changes to reforestation policies for Canada’s public forests are acceptable to the public and other stakeholders and end-users. The knowledge obtained from this project will inform tree breeding and reforestation in rapidly changing climates, by identifying opportunities for improving forest health through, as well as risks from, assisted migration.
ActiveForestry
TRIA-FoR: Transformative risk assessment and forest resilience using genomic tools for the Mountain Pine Beetle outbreak
Competition/Funding OpportunityGenome Canada 2020 Large-Scale Applied Research Competition
Project Lead(s)/Co-Lead(s)Janice Cooke (University of Alberta) & Catherine Cullingham (Carleton University)