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The conservation and sustainable use of forests is one of the major challenges of the 21st century, in a context of strong but uncertain environmental change. Society demands that forests provide a wide range of potentially conflicting ecosystem services, from wood products and raw materials to renewable energy, climate change mitigation, space for socio-cultural activities and habitats for nature conservation.

Genetic diversity is a key component of resilience and adaptability. Forest tree populations are generally highly genetically diverse, which gives them the potential to adapt through natural processes such as gene flow and natural selection. The extent and rate at which local adaptation occurs, and whether adaptation and resilience of some functional traits conflict with adaptation and resilience of other functional traits, remains largely unknown in forest trees. Without this basic scientific knowledge, innovative approaches to forest management and policy will fall far short of the challenges posed by environmental and social constraints.

Access to large-scale genomic, phenotypic, environmental, and policy data could open new perspectives in how adaptation and resilience are studied and understood.