AMECO

In order to survive, trees should be adapted to current conditions and to those expected under global warming by the end of the century. However, natural populations will not always be adapted to the expected climate change, and therefore mitigation strategies must be adopted. One increasingly studied mitigation option to protect biodiversity in the face of climate change is assisted migration (AM), by which populations are intentionally relocated in northern areas or higher altitudes to compensate for observed or expected climate change to increase population survival and maintain ecosystem services. The work proposed in this project involves the evaluation of multi-species and multi-AM scenarios of survival-adaptation, productivity and assessment risk scenarios. The main goal was to produce scenarios (theoretical representations) of AM for European forests that would imply altitudinal and latitudinal assisted migration actions to mitigate climate change.

Analysis of a well-document failed case of population translocation of Pinus pinaster Ait from the Iberian Peninsula to southern France, which entailed an enormous economic loss.

A second step was devoted to propose new scenarios for translocations in the future based on climate data and the fitness (measured as the volume/year as recorded in NFI). Estimation of the vulnerability of the native species in Western Europe including the sensitivity, the exposure and the adaptive capacity of the major tree species in ecological models for creating scenarios for current climatic conditions and future ones.

Development of a decision framework based on variations in tree fitness in relation with climate.