Genetic considerations in ecosystem restoration using native tree species

By E. Thomas, R. Jalonen, J. Loo, D.H Boshier, Leonardo A. Gallo, S. Cavers, Sándor Bordács, Paul Smith, Michele Bozzano. 2014

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rehabilitation and restoration of forest ecosystems are in growing demand to tackle climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification—major environmental problems of our time. Interest in restoration of ecosystems is increasingly translated into strong political commitment to large-scale tree planting projects. Along with this new impetus and the enormous scale of planned projects come both opportunities and risks: opportunities to significantly increase the use of native species, and risks of failure associated with the use of inadequate or mismatched reproductive material, which though it may provide forest cover in the short term, will not likely establish a self-sustaining ecosystem. The value of using native tree species in ecosystem restoration is receiving growing recognition both among restoration practitioners and policy makers. However, insufficient attention has been given to genetic variation within and among native tree species, their life histories and the consequences of their interactions with each other and with their environment. Also restoration practitioners have often neglected to build in safeguards against the anticipated effects of anthropogenic climate change. Measurement of restoration success has tended to be assessments of hectares covered or seedling survival in a short timeframe, neither of which is an indicator of ecosystem establishment in the long term. In this article, we review current practices in ecosystem restoration using native tree species, with a particular focus on genetic considerations. Our discussion is organised across three themes: (i) species selection and the sourcing of forest reproductive material; (ii) increasing resilience by fostering natural selection, ecological connectivity and species associations; and (iii) measuring the success of restoration activities. We present a number of practical recommendations for researchers, policymakers and restoration practitioners to increase the potential for successful interventions. We recommend the development and adoption of decision-support tools for: (i) collecting and propagating germplasm in a way that ensures a broad genetic base of restored tree populations, including planning the sourcing of propagation material of desired species well before the intended planting time; (ii) matching species and provenances to restoration sites based on current and future site conditions, predicted or known patterns of variation in adaptive traits and availability of seed sources; and (iii) landscape-level planning in restoration projects.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c4604f89d0c8d10f6724f516c7d7e83d92775525

Citations in the corpus

• Utilization and transfer of forest genetic resources: A global review (2014, unknown): “The topic is discussed further in other papers of this special issue (Wickneswari et al., 2014; Thomas et al., 2014).”
• Climate-adjusted provenancing: a strategy for climate-resilient ecological restoration (2015, unknown): “Climate-adjusted provenancing contrasts with “predictive” provenancing (Crowe and Parker, 2008; Wang et al., 2010; Sgrò et al., 2011, Figure 1E), a strategy that similarly targets adaptation to climate.”
• Banking on the future: progress, challenges and opportunities for the genetic conservation of forest trees (2017, unknown): “To ensure that restored plant species will survive and be able to produce viable offspring , which is necessary for a restored ecosystem to be both functional and resilient, it is crucial that the planting material represents a certain minimum level of intraspecific diversity (Thomas et al. 2014a).”
• Innovative approaches to the preservation of forest trees (2014, unknown): “Restoration efforts involving native tree species are discussed in detail elsewhere in this special issue (Thomas et al., 2014).”