Biodiversity Seminar: Preparing forests for the future – characterizing white oak climatic adaptation (ACORN)

European white oaks grow from the Mediterranean coast to Southern Scandinavia, a huge environmental gradient that has likely fostered local climatic adaptations (e.g. to drought or extreme temperatures). Leveraging these adaptations for assisted migration of seeds could help maintain oak forest health under climate change by facilitating climatic niche tracking and/or beneficial gene flow. However, an understanding of the geographical scale and genomic architecture of environmental adaptation is needed as a guide. Particularly because it is unclear if the signature of environmental adaptation is population specific in oak trees, or if it is only visible at larger scales. 

At WSL, we established a common garden of oak (Quercus robur, Q. pubescens, Q. petraea) seedlings in 2021 to characterize standing local adaptation and trait genomic architecture. This set-up was mirrored in Turkey and Austria. The provenances planted were selected from both distributional and local environmental extremes (i.e. chronic soil drought vs. moist soil). Across both years, seedlings were measured at key productivity and water use efficiency traits (e.g. carbon and nitrogen isotopes). We then characterized the genomic architecture of traits, through low coverage whole genome sequencing and Genome-Wide Association Analysis (GWAS).

Our seminars are hybrid. Please send an email to events-biodiversity(at)wsl.ch if you would like to get access to the live stream.

The Biodiversity Seminar Series are organized by the WSL Biodiversity Center. Every two weeks, we aim to host a seminar speaker that presents research or outreach on topics relevant to the biodiversity community at WSL. The seminars are public and are usually broadcasted online.

To find out more about the WSL Biodiversity Center and a complete list of events, please visit our website. 

Please send an email to events-biodiversity(at)wsl.ch if you would like to be updated on the activities of the WSL Biodiversity Center.