Project Overview
Tens of thousands of people are employed in forestry in BC and Alberta generating billions of dollars in combined revenue and taxes. Forests also provide many ecosystem services that society has access to with little to no cost. However, a changing climate may create a mismatch between locally adapted tree populations and their environment, ultimately threatening the ability of forests to provide ecological, economic and cultural services. In fact, climate change has already had negative impacts on our forests in the form of increasing severity of insect and disease outbreaks, such as the recent mountain pine beetle epidemic.
Finding Genes that Matter
Foresters have long known that species with widespread distributions tend to be adapted to their local climates. This local adaptation is often highly heritable, meaning that it can be passed from parents to offspring. This has been demonstrated using provenance trials, where seeds from multiple populations are planted in different common gardens to assess their growth under a range of climates. These large experiments typically show that seeds planted in a garden far from their location of origin will grow poorly compared to seeds collected close to the garden. While these experiments show there is a strong genetic basis to climate adaptation, because offspring resemble parents, we do not fully understand which genes control these traits and how they differ among populations.
The Focus of Conversation
Values and perceptions influence our decisions and the kinds of policy and actions we support. The success or failure of policy is in turn tied to its support from the general public and leading public figures. As the ultimate goal of AdapTree is policy recommendations, we set out to study perceptions of the use of assisted migration and genomics within forestry. We hosted focus groups in forestry dependent towns in British Columbia and Alberta to see how people felt about different methods of forest management.
By running a series of focus groups we could note the reasoning behind people’s decisions to support or reject management techniques. The results of these discussions together with information gathered from a survey addressing similar questions will give the AdapTree team a better view of how people in forestry dependent communities might react to our policy recommendations.
What the Future Holds
Climate change threatens our forests in a number of ways such as the possibility of locally adapted populations becoming unsuited to their new climate and increased risk of severe pathogen mortality. Without knowing what future climates will look like it would be difficult or impossible to create effective solutions to these and other problems. Members of the AdapTree team have been involved in creating and maintaining predictive climate models—ClimateBC and ClimateWNA—and projecting future climatic spaces for BC ecosystems and individual tree species.
ClimateBC &WNA are capable of outputting highly detailed data in British Columbia and western North America. Sometimes climate forecasting is done at rough resolutions (km2 for example) as the people using the programs are more concerned with larger trends. This low resolution data is less useful when dealing with plant ecology because small changes in topography, elevation, aspect and other factors can have large impacts on the surrounding plant community. Our climate programs factor in small changes to longitude, latitude and elevation to create higher resolution output. Output can be provided for 21 annual, 48 seasonal and 144 monthly climate variables. Some of the variables are of specific interest to those studying plant communities but may not be considered as important for other climate projection projects. This includes things like length of frost free days or length of optimal growing season.
