Centuries of provenance trials: towards predictive infrastructures for forest adaptation under climate change

Katalin Csilléry, Julie Gauzere, Carolina Cornejo, Kateřina Houšková, Pär K Ingvarsson, Alexandro B Leverkus, Katharina J Liepe, Raul de la Mata, Sofia Julia van Moorsel , Niels A Müller, José Alberto Ramírez-Valiente, Meredith Christine Schuman , Julia A Schwarz, Charalambos Neophytou

Provenance trials are among forestry's most valuable experimental legacies. Established over centuries to compare species and provenances, they laid the foundation for understanding local adaptation and supported tree breeding, but remained focused on growth, timber quality, and ranking provenances by performance. Climate change calls for a next generation of comparative trials that can help forecast forest regeneration, persistence, and adaptation. We use a backcasting approach, starting from this desired future state and working backward to identify future needs. We argue for an integrative approach that covers the whole life cycle, including regeneration and biotic stress responses, and that incorporates ecological realism. We also need to better exploit legacy experiments and develop coordinated, distributed experiments across environmental gradients, including extreme conditions, and involving stakeholders. Next-generation trials should be conceived as training populations for genomic prediction and exploit opportunities offered by remote sensing technologies for high-throughput phenotyping. Coordinated networks can transform static experiments into evolving predictive infrastructures for adaptive forest management today.