Assisted migration to address climate change in forestry: validating habitat and growth projections

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Human-aided movement of species populations in large-scale reforestation programs could be an effective and cost-efficient climate change adaptation strategy. Assisted migration prescriptions in forestry are currently being implemented by several Canadian provincial forestry agencies. Such large-scale management interventions, however, tend to entail the risks of unintended consequences, especially when guided by imperfect models and partial information. This project will fill scientific knowledge gaps and develop robust modeling techniques that can directly inform policy developments for seed transfer at this critical juncture. The central idea of this research program is to use introductions of North American tree species to Europe as a test bed for how these species may grow and survive under novel climatic environments. Especially Sitka spruce and Douglas-fir have been widely tested in Europe for decades, and are commercially planted in many locations where they proved productive and resilient. We use this opportunity to validate our North American habitat models against completely independent data, and by implication evaluate their realism to guide forestry operations under climate change. Specifically, we will test a new class of species distribution model, which was developed to guide choice of planting stock for reforestation in western Canada. We will apply the model trained for Sitka spruce and Douglas-fir to European planting environments, and validate its predictions against data from European provenance trials (20- to 80-year old experimental plantations with known origin of seed sources). Additional validations will be carried out against growth records from tree ring data and up to hundred years of forest inventory records from ten European countries.