Diversity and management effects on forest evolution - TREEvolution

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Forests cover nearly 40% of Europe and are among the most diverse and species-rich habitats in our cultural landscape. Forests also exert a significant influence on regional climates through their biogeophysical feedbacks to climate forcing and provide various ecosystem services. However, extreme weather events, like the drought during spring and summer in the years 2018 to 2020 in Germany, threaten the health and thus the ecosystem functioning of forests in central Europe. Fagus sylvatica, still the most important forest tree species in Central Europe, showed significant damages following these droughts. However, it became quickly evident, that even within stands tree reactions to the drought varied substantially with drought-damaged trees neighboring healthy trees and thus suggesting a genotypic background. One life-history trait common to most forest trees is the massive life-time production of seeds combined with a well-known large standing genetic variation, offering a substantial basis for selection to act upon. Assuming that extreme years increase in frequency, such selection would ensure that beech forests in the future are better adapted to early summer drought events. With the availability of a chromosome-level beech genome and the unique experimental setup of the Biodiversity-Exploratories, we plan to investigate the genomic diversity dynamics in beech populations among life stages (seedlings, saplings and adult trees) across a large representative sample using all beech-containing Experimental Forest Plots of the Biodiversity-Exploratories. We aim at identifying the demographic processes and genes under selection, investigate the effects of forest management and the year of establishment using the FOX multi-site experiment, applying reduced-representation and low-coverage sequencing methods. Given the multitude of abiotic and biotic environmental variables that potentially can influence the selection acting on beech seedlings and saplings, the Biodiversity-Exploratories provide a perfect environment for TREEvolution, due to the large amount of data available from previous and ongoing research on these same sites. In turn, we will provide genome-wide diversity information for one of the key-species in the Experimental plots in which it is present. TREEvolution will provide insights into the evolutionary dynamics at young tree age, which shape the resistance and resilience of our forests of tomorrow. This will help us to understand if and how fast beech forests can evolutionarily track the current climatic changes, and to be able to adapt the current standard silvicultural management.