The strong changes in climate are threatening the resilience of forest production systems, requiring that forest owners and managers anticipate the adaptation of their forest with the challenging choice species and provenances adapted to future climate.
With the objective to provide support recommendation on the choice of genetic resources choices in the context of climate change, the project ESPERENSE brings together the main French actors in forest R&D (Irstea, INRA, CNPF, ONF and FCBA) in collaboration with the EFI Planted Forests Facility.
The main aim of ESPERENSE project is to initiate a network of experiments (tree species/provenances arboreta, forest demonstrations sites) along France to monitor climate change impact on genetic resources in order to quickly the genetic material more adapted to the future climatic conditions.
Based on the analysis of existing experimental projects and the definition of critical and vulnerable areas of production, the project partners commit to set up a long term cooperation consortium for the design and establishment of the experiment network with common protocols and a strategy of communication of the results beyond the financing timeframe of the project.
This network will strongly benefit from the collaboration with EFI Planted Forests Facility, which will provide its expertise on protocols, species selection and seed provision as coordinator of the REINFFORCE network.
In addition, EFI Planted Forests Facility will contribute since the establishment of the consortium to the setting up and management of a platform for data sharing and to the improvement of existing databases.
Partners
Irstea, INRA, CNPF, ONF, FCBA, EFI Planted Forests Facility