Forest tree species adaptation to climate across biomes: Building on the legacy of ecological genetics to anticipate responses to climate change

Abstract

AbstractIntraspecific variation plays a critical role in extant and future forest responses to climate change. Forest tree species with wide climatic niches rely on the intraspecific variation resulting from genetic adaptation and phenotypic plasticity to accommodate spatial and temporal climate variability. A centuries‐old legacy of forest ecological genetics and provenance trials has provided a strong foundation upon which to continue building on this knowledge, which is critical to maintain climate‐adapted forests. Our overall objective is to understand forest trees intraspecific responses to climate across species and biomes, while our specific objectives are to describe ecological genetics models used to build our foundational knowledge, summarize modeling approaches that have expanded the traditional toolset, and extensively review the literature from 1994 to 2021 to highlight the main contributions of this legacy and the new analyzes of provenance trials. We reviewed 103 studies comprising at least three common gardens, which covered 58 forest tree species, 28 of them with range‐wide studies. Although studies using provenance trial data cover mostly commercially important forest tree species from temperate and boreal biomes, this synthesis provides a global overview of forest tree species adaptation to climate. We found that evidence for genetic adaptation to local climate is commonly present in the species studied (79%), being more common in conifers (87.5%) than in broadleaf species (67%). In 57% of the species, clines in fitness‐related traits were associated with temperature variables, in 14% of the species with precipitation, and in 25% of the species with both. Evidence of adaptation lags was found in 50% of the species with range‐wide studies. We conclude that ecological genetics models and analysis of provenance trial data provide excellent insights on intraspecific genetic variation, whereas the role and limits of phenotypic plasticity, which will likely determine the fate of extant forests, is vastly understudied.