https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7070-3292
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Patrick Fonti, Christian Rellstab, Elisabet Martínez-Sancho, Deciphering ‘time to hydraulic failure’ to select drought-resistant tree provenances, Tree Physiology, Volume 42, Issue 4, April 2022, Pages 704–707, https://doi.org/10.1093/treephys/tpac010
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This scientific commentary refers to ‘Adaptive plasticity in plant traits increases time to hydraulic failure under drought in a foundation tree’ by Challis et al. (doi: 10.1093/treephys/tpab096).
A gardener continuously reassesses the correct selection and location of plants within a park to ensure that they thrive long term. Similarly, a forest manager has to decide which tree species and/or provenances should be promoted when and where to ensure that the forest will sustainably accomplish its functions and services for future generations. However, because we are now in a time of unprecedented rapid climate change, such tasks entail huge uncertainties regarding the future forest’s capacity to survive in a dramatically changing environment. Because of typically long rotation periods (often more than 100 years) due to their longevity and late reproductive maturity, and often limited seed dispersal capacities, forest tree populations rely on phenotypic plasticity and/or local adaptation to face such changes. If this does not suffice, forest managers can assist the transition by adjusting management strategies (e.g., reducing competition for limited resources by reducing density or increasing species mixtures, e.g., Bottero et al. 2021), selecting seeds from other regions of the species’ distribution that are presumably better adapted to the future climate (assisted gene flow, Aitken and Bemmels 2016) and/or selecting more climate-resilient tree species (assisted migration, Peters and Darling 1985). Considering the speed of the climatic changes, the need to understand the processes and traits promoting resilience to stress is becoming more and more urgent, and needs to become a research priority for the whole plant science community (Anderegg et al. 2019).
