Michele Bozzano

European Forest Institute | EFI · Resilience Programme - Bonn

The Genetic Resources Strategy for Europe (GRSE) is an overarching, integrated strategy for the conservation and use of plant, animal and forest genetic resources both the domesticated and wild to ensure more sustainable EU land use policies for the future. It was developed in a three-step consensus seeking iterative process involving EU, national...

Ecological modeling refers to the construction and analysis of mathematical models aimed at understanding the complexity of ecological processes and at predicting how real ecosystems might evolve. It is a quickly expanding approach boosted by impressive accelerations in the availability of computational resources and environmental databases. In the...

https://efi.int/publications-bank/mediterranean-forest-research-agenda-2030 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The first Mediterranean Forest Research Agenda 2010-2020 (MFRA 2020) (Palahi et al., 2009) was written over a decade ago now. Since then, accelerating climate, ecological, socioeconomic and political changes have been transforming the compl...

Marginal and peripheral populations are important for biodiversity conservation. Their original situation in a species’ geographic and ecological space often confers them genetic diversity and traits of high adaptive value. Yet theoretical hypotheses related to marginality are difficult to test because of confounding factors that influence marginal...

Current global declines in genetic resources due to social, economic and environmental factors are rendering agriculture and forestry increasingly vulnerable to climate change, and may affect the stability and adaptability of natural capital. A transformative change is needed to more urgently prioritise conserving genetic resources and promote thei...

PREFACE (Authored by Michele Bozzano) The genetic makeup of Forest Reproductive Material (FRM) is directly affected by the decisions made by the various actors involved in its production chain. These decisions, which often ignore the genetic perspective, have a major impact on the survival of future forests. There are still gaps and uncertainties i...

ISBN 978-952-7426-46-3 (pdf)ISBN 978-952-7426-47-0 (print)

The maintenance, conservation, and appropriate enhancement of biodiversity remains an important goal for forest management in Europe. Biodiversity is generally considered valuable per se as well as being important for the adaptability and stability of forests. Forest management can support biodiversity through a range of practices – such as support...

Through the Horizon 2020 project ’GenRes Bridge’ the new journal Genetic Resources was conceived to serve as a new cross-cutting platform for stakeholders and practitioners in genetic resources. Its ambition is to provide access to relevant information and tools for the monitoring, conservation, management, characterization and use of genetic resou...

Acknowledgements The report benefited from the helpful comments from external reviewers, Arttu Malkamäki from the University of Helsinki and Margarida Tomé from the University of Lisbon. We wish to express our thanks for their insights and comments that helped to improve the report, and acknowledge that they are in no way responsible for any remain...

WorldClim version 1 is a high-resolution, global climate gridded dataset covering 1961-1990; a "normal" climate. It has been widely used for ecological studies thanks to its free availability and global coverage. This study aims to evaluate the quality of WorldClim data by quantifying any discrepancies by comparison with an independent dataset of m...

The aim of this study is to help build a knowledge base for the review of the EU Forest Strategy that was adopted by the European Commission in 2013. The EU Forest Strategy addresses 8 priority areas that were identified as being particularly relevant for forests and the forest-based sector until 2020. These priority areas address: (i) support of r...

•• Forest restoration projects can derive great benefit from integrating climate modeling, functional trait analysis and genetic considerations in the selection of appropriate tree species and sources of forest reproductive material, for their critical importance for the delivery of ecosystem services and the viability and adaptive capacity of rest...

Planting trees to sequester carbon dioxide mitigates climate change, but it has been contended that insufficient attention is given to the quality of the germplasm established in afforestation/reforestation programmes, limiting sequestration opportunities. To understand current practices in the choice, sourcing and delivery of tree planting materia...

What to consider to increase the likelihood of self-sustaining restoration

This file contains the full report text of "State of Europe's Forest 2015". Due to size limitations, the annexes are presented in a separate file upload. Together the two files make up the entire 314 pages report.

The likelihood of success of forest restoration can be improved by choosing genetically diverse forest reproductive material that is well adapted to the planting sites. Adequate attention to the genetic quality of forest reproductive material (FRM) is particularly important for forest restoration, including tree-planting activities that aim to rein...

Indicator 4.1 Tree species composition Around 70% of the forests in Europe are dominated by 2 or more tree species. The remaining 30% are dominated by 1 tree species alone, mainly conifers. The area of forest covered by a single tree species decreased over the last 15 years at a rate of around 0.6% annually. This may be related to changes in forest...

The Summary for Policy Makers is a brief document based on information included in the “State of Europe’s Forests 2015”report. This document offers a comprehensive overview of European forests, their current status, trends and policy responses related to them, as well as an insight into sustainable forest management (SFM) in Europe. The State of E...

We propose the development of a certification scheme for forest ecosystem restoration that aims for the adoption of protocols and guidelines to ensure the sustained ecological and social value of restored ecosystems. Despite an accumulation of experience on ecosystem restoration over the past decades, it is still common to measure the success of re...

Forest trees are long-lived species with high genetic diversity that is crucial for their survival, regeneration and adaptation. However, forest managers and conservationists are often not well informed about the relevance of genetic aspects to population viability. Lack of understanding of forest genetic resources (FGR) therefore constrains conser...

Many European countries have undertaken the static preservation of native elm genotypes in clone collections maintained ex situ. Less development has been devoted to the dynamic conservation of elm populations in situ. Case studies of elm conservation in France are given here as an illustration of methods employed at country level. We also briefly...

A working group was established by the EUFORGEN Steering Committee to develop the pan-European genetic conservation strategy for forest trees. For each species, the strategy calls for a core network of dynamic conservation units. These units are not interconnected by geneflow, but together capture the current genetic diversity across the European c...

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 t...

There is renewed interest in the use of native tree species in ecosystem restoration for their biodiversity benefits. Growing native tree species in production systems (e.g. plantation forests and subsistence agriculture) can also ensure landscape functionality and support for human livelihoods. Achieving full benefits, however, requires considerat...

A transnational network of genetic conservation units for forest trees was recently documented in Europe aiming at the conservation of evolutionary processes and the adaptive potential of natural or man-made tree populations. In this study, we quantified the vulnerability of individual conservation units and the whole network to climate change usin...

Dynamic conservation of forest genetic resources (FGR) means maintaining the genetic diversity of trees within an evolutionary process and allowing generation turnover in the forest. We assessed the network of forests areas managed for the dynamic conservation of FGR (conservation units) across Europe (33 countries). On the basis of information ava...

Genetic resources of forest trees are considered as a key factor for the per-sistence of forest ecosystems because the ability of tree species to survive under changing climate depends strongly on their intraspecific variation in climate response. Therefore, utilizing available genetic variation in climate response and planting alternative prove-na...

Key findings by Indicators 4.1 Tree species composition The area of forest that consists of a single tree species has decreased annually by around 0.6 percent during the last 15-year period. About 70 percent of the forests in Europe are dominated by two or several tree species, and the remaining 30 percent are dominated by one tree species alone,...

Download at http://forest-genetic-resources-training-guide.bioversityinternational.org This set of training materials makes Forest Genetic Resources (FGR) training relevant, attractive and accessible to non-specialists. It enables teachers and trainers to cover FGR issues in their courses, and increase understanding of how to manage diverse and c...