Workshop: Project Baseline--Developing Genetic Materials to Assess the Evolutionary Consequences of Global Climate Change.

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Ongoing global climate change is placing selection pressures on populations world-wide. For many populations, traits will evolve in ways that promote survival and reproduction under the altered ecological conditions that climate change will bring. This workshop will provide the initial planning for Project Baseline, a nation-wide collaborative effort to gather, freeze and archive seed from contemporary plant populations. Decades from now, these ancestral seeds can be "resurrected" and grown side by side with their descendants under controlled environmental conditions. Evolutionary changes in ecologically important traits then can be measured and the genetic basis for these changes probed. The proposed workshop will gather ideas from top researchers in plant population biology, genomics, and theoretical evolutionary genetics for the design of seed collection protocols and will compile a list of candidate plant species. Plant seed conservation experts will provide advice on the logistics of cataloging and preserving seeds for future use. Future biologists will be able to use these resources to answer significant questions concerning the genetic basis of evolutionary change by studying both adaptive responses to selection and limits to adaptation.