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Tree restoration potential in the European Union
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The impacts of environmental degradation and climate change are a threat to the world and Europe. The European Green Deal is the roadmap for making the EU’s economy sustainable by turning climate and environmental challenges into opportunities across all policy areas and making the transition just and inclusive for all. One of the actions in the roadmap is to restore biodiversity, a key nature-based solution to mitigate the negative impacts of environmental degradation and climate change.
One of the potential avenues to restore biodiversity in Europe is to assess the restoration potential of European ecosystems. Their natural (biophysical) potential. The question that this report therefore tackles is what Europe’s capacity is to restore its ecosystems through tree restoration.
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... The severity of these changes can be seen at regional, continental, and global scales [3][4][5][6]. At present, solutions to these issues are being sought in order to identify species and varieties with high resilience to climate change [7][8][9][10][11]. Management strategies could include actions to increase the resistance of forest ecosystems to adverse conditions [12,13]. ...
Swiss stone pine (Pinus cembra L.) may represent a vital species for afforestation at the upper altitudinal limits of forests due to its adaptability to challenging environmental conditions. In this study, we aimed to analyze the variability in ring width (radial growth, RW, earlywood, EW, latewood, LW, and latewood proportion, LWP) and the influence of different sites on the climatic resilience of twelve European provenances of Swiss stone pine to identify the best-adapted provenances. Five provenances from the Alps and seven from the Carpathians were tested across two 27-year-old field trials conducted in the Eastern and Southern Carpathians. Moderate genetic differentiation among the provenances was noted, which could ensure the success of breeding programs. Based on ring width and latewood proportion, we successfully selected the 25% best-performing provenances and recommend them for use in the provenance regions where have performed. The significant influence of the testing site and the different outcomes of the provenances necessitate extreme attention during the transfer of forest reproductive materials. Additionally, the breeding strategies applied in the two trials differed, consisting in individual selection in the Cugir trial and provenance selection in the Cârlibaba trial. The low resistance of all provenances shown in both trials, particularly in the Cugir trial, is worrying in the context of global warming.
... Therefore, adaptation actions are required to maintain ecosystem services and improve the resilience of forests towards further climate warming 7-10 . To use the carbon sequestration capacity of forests, tree planting and forest restoration have been suggested as nature-based solutions to mitigate global warming [11][12][13][14] . The selection of tree species, suitable forest reproductive material and the promotion of mixed forests 14,15 are expected to play important roles in forest adaptation and climate change (CC) mitigation 16,17 . ...
Climate change threatens the role of European forests as a long-term carbon sink. Assisted migration aims to increase the resilience of forest tree populations to climate change, using species-specific climatic limits and local adaptations through transferring seed provenances. We modelled assisted migration scenarios for seven main European tree species and analysed the effects of species and seed provenance selection, accounting for environmental and genetic variations, on the annual above-ground carbon sink of regrowing juvenile forests. To increase forest resilience, coniferous trees need to be replaced by deciduous species over large parts of their distribution. If local seed provenances are used, this would result in a decrease of the current carbon sink (40 TgC yr −1) by 34-41% by 2061-2080. However, if seed provenances adapted to future climates are used, current sinks could be maintained or even increased to 48-60 TgC yr −1. By removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forests can play a crucial role in limiting the rise in global annual temperatures to 1.5-2 °C (refs. 1,2). European forests cover ~35% of the total land surface and store ~9.8 Tg of carbon, with an average annual sequestration of 155 TgC between 2010 and 2020 3. However, climate change-induced disturbances pose a serious threat to this carbon pool 4-6 and other forest ecosystem services. Therefore, adaptation actions are required to maintain ecosystem services and improve the resilience of forests towards further climate warming 7-10. To use the carbon sequestration capacity of forests, tree planting and forest restoration have been suggested as nature-based solutions to mitigate global warming 11-14. The selection of tree species, suitable forest reproductive material and the promotion of mixed forests 14,15 are expected to play important roles in forest adaptation and climate change (CC) mitigation 16,17. Owing to the strong impact of CC on tree species distributions 18-20 and the limited migration capacity of trees 21,22 , forest restoration and adaptation will need to take the site suitability of species and populations into account. Moreover, restricted gene flow, as well as the limited capacity of trees to adapt genetically to the fast pace of CC, will result in serious maladaptations (but see ref. 23), local species extinctions and a reduction of ecosystem services within the remaining forests 23-26. Therefore, assisted migration (AM) of tree species and seed provenances have been proposed as measures to use species-specific climatic limits and local adaptations to improve the adaptive capacity
... Therefore, adaptation actions are required to maintain ecosystem services and improve the resilience of forests towards further climate warming 7-10 . To use the carbon sequestration capacity of forests, tree planting and forest restoration have been suggested as nature-based solutions to mitigate global warming [11][12][13][14] . The selection of tree species, suitable forest reproductive material and the promotion of mixed forests 14,15 are expected to play important roles in forest adaptation and climate change (CC) mitigation 16,17 . ...
Climate change threatens the role of European forests as a long-term carbon sink. Assisted migration aims to increase the resilience of forest tree populations to climate change, using species-specific climatic limits and local adaptations through transferring seed provenances. We modelled assisted migration scenarios for seven main European tree species and analysed the effects of species and seed provenance selection, accounting for environmental and genetic variations, on the annual above-ground carbon sink of regrowing juvenile forests. To increase forest resilience, coniferous trees need to be replaced by deciduous species over large parts of their distribution. If local seed provenances are used, this would result in a decrease of the current carbon sink (40 TgC yr⁻¹) by 34–41% by 2061–2080. However, if seed provenances adapted to future climates are used, current sinks could be maintained or even increased to 48–60 TgC yr⁻¹.
The EU Biodiversity strategy aims to plant 3 billion trees by 2030, in order to improve ecosystem restoration and biodiversity. Here, we compute the land area that would be required to support this number of newly planted trees by taking account of different tree species and planting regimes across the EU member states. We find that 3 billion trees would require a total land area of between 0.81 and 1.37 Mha (avg. 1.02 Mha). The historic forest expansion in the EU since 2010 was 2.44 Mha, meaning that despite 3 billion trees sounding like a large number this target is considerably lower than historic afforestation rates within the EU, i.e. only 40% of the past trend. Abandoned agricultural land is often proposed as providing capacity for afforestation. We estimate agricultural abandoned land areas from the HIstoric Land Dynamics Assessment+ (HILDA+) database using two time thresholds (abandonment since 2009 or 2014) to identify potential areas for tree planting. The area of agricultural abandoned land was 2.6 Mha (potentially accommodating 7.2 billion trees) since 2009 and 0.2 Mha (potentially accommodating 741 million trees) since 2014. Our study highlights that sufficient space could be available to meet the 3 billion tree planting target from abandoned land. However, large-scale afforestation beyond abandoned land could have displacement effects elsewhere in the world because of the embodied deforestation in the import of agricultural crops and livestock. This would negate the expected benefits of EU afforestation. Hence, the EU's relatively low ambition on tree planting may actually be better in terms of avoiding such displacement effects. We suggest that tree planting targets should be set at a level that considers physical ecosystem dynamics as well as socioeconomic conditions.
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