Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FORGENIUS (Improving access to FORest GENetic resources Information and services for end-USers)
Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2023-12-31
Forests cover 33% of Europe’s land area and provide essential ecological and societal services; they, sequester 719 million tonnes CO2 / year and provide over 3 million jobs. These services rely on rich Forest Genetic Resources (Forest GenRes), which are mostly conserved in situ, allowing continuous adaptation. European countries and the EU have long promoted, supported and implemented conservation of these resources. The European Forest Genetic Resources Programme (EUFORGEN), founded in 1994, is the most advanced programme of its kind, worldwide. Its main achievement is a continent-wide network of in situ Forest GenRes collections (http://portal.eufgis.org/) called Genetic Conservation Units (GCUs). GCUs are selected to represent forest tree populations adapted to unique sets of environmental conditions and have distinct genetic, phenotypic, and/or ecological characteristics. End-users in the fields of Forest GenRes conservation and management, breeding, and forest policy-making need improved data, standards and tools to harness the full value of these unique populations.
FORGENIUS will build high quality, harmonized and standardized indices and predictive tools for the evaluation of quality, diversity, resilience, and breeding potential associated to the 4000+ GCUs of the EUFOGEN network, that will be used by GenRes managers and conservationists to establish science-based GenRes management strategies. Its standards can be applied to domesticated relatives of forest trees (e.g. cherry tree, apple tree), as well as to Forest GenRes management in third countries.
FORGENIUS will also provide novel services to end-users for autonomously evaluating the resilience and breeding potential of extant GCUs, and will provide standardized information to policymakers about the value and conservation status of GCUs and of the whole collection.
The overall goal of FORGENIUS is to produce new high-throughput quantitative assessment of Forest GenRes and make it accessible to end-users by developing general standards, tools and services for a better characterization and management of the entire GCU collection. To do this, FORGENIUS will: i) assess genetic and phenotypic diversity, as well as resilience, of GCUs under climate change; ii) apply the novel data to underpin management decisions that promote the resilience and adaptability of GCUs; iii) characterise Forest GenRes to identify high-quality germplasm for breeding and plantations; iv) create novel services for end-users within and beyond the conservation communities.
FORGENIUS will build high quality, harmonized and standardized indices and predictive tools for the evaluation of quality, diversity, resilience, and breeding potential associated to the 4000+ GCUs of the EUFOGEN network, that will be used by GenRes managers and conservationists to establish science-based GenRes management strategies. Its standards can be applied to domesticated relatives of forest trees (e.g. cherry tree, apple tree), as well as to Forest GenRes management in third countries.
FORGENIUS will also provide novel services to end-users for autonomously evaluating the resilience and breeding potential of extant GCUs, and will provide standardized information to policymakers about the value and conservation status of GCUs and of the whole collection.
The overall goal of FORGENIUS is to produce new high-throughput quantitative assessment of Forest GenRes and make it accessible to end-users by developing general standards, tools and services for a better characterization and management of the entire GCU collection. To do this, FORGENIUS will: i) assess genetic and phenotypic diversity, as well as resilience, of GCUs under climate change; ii) apply the novel data to underpin management decisions that promote the resilience and adaptability of GCUs; iii) characterise Forest GenRes to identify high-quality germplasm for breeding and plantations; iv) create novel services for end-users within and beyond the conservation communities.
Over the second Reporting Period, FORGENIUS has reached its cruise speed. All Work Packages have moved from the establishment of protocols and early phases of data collection to the materialisation of the main products the project is expected to provide.
FORGENIUS is a very complex and heterogeneous action, bringing together scientists from multiple research fields, who were not used to share their research before, as well as a gradient of sensitivities from pure research to pure management. Multiple cogs, represented by the first six work packages, constitute an efficient and streamlined chain of transmission of information, from science to management and back. The ultimate goal of the project, like a flower at the tip of the stem of a flowering plant, is a new information system for the description of the network of Genetic Conservation Units, coupled with a user-friendly interface allowing the user to navigate unassisted through the sysWe are happy to announce that the collection of genomic, eco-physiological, environmental data that feed the new, multi-disciplinary, dynamic information system is following its course, and that the Information System, as well as the Query Interface, have already a close-to-final shape. This state of things will be apparent while reading this report. In other words, while we are only at the end of the second Reporting Period, corresponding to only 60% of project duration, we can already confidently state that FORGENIUS is delivering what it had promised. Much work remains to be done, and one cannot underestimate the practical hurdles that we have faced and that still lie ahead of us, yet the fact are there for everyone to see: at Month 36 out of 60, most of the expected outcomes are clearly sketched out, developed, and in some cases almost finalised. The reading of individual Work Package reports will duly account for this.
Saying that all partners have shown exceptional engagement in FORGENIUS is almost an understatement. Everyone has shown so far a bright will to reach their goals and co contribute to others’. Teams involved in each work package have shown a perfect understanding of how the different action get together to produce a coherent, high-quality final output. This is a great promise for the rest of the project, and it makes us confident that even more high standard, exciting action will happen during the final phase of the project.
WP1 has made great strides in the development of models allowing to connect high-throughput, remote-sensing data to tree and stand resilience, a necessary move to generalise the characterisation of the conservation network. WP2 has gathered vast amounts of information on the characters allowing trees to stand environmental challenges, linking back to WP1 and forward to WP3, which has made major advances on the determination of the genetic bases of such adaptive characters. WP4 has progressed in the genomic characterisation of the Genetic Conservation Units, and in the determination of the relevant evolutionary parameters helping track adaptive potential. WP5 has defined the backbone, structure, and code of the new EUFGIS Information System, and is already integrating the new data as they become available. WP6 has produced the beta version of the brand new, shiny query web application for the Information System. WP7 has vamped up the project’s communication with new, wide-impact actions such as the public webinars and the newsletter. All these actions have been tightly coordinated, while having their own autonomy, and contribute to the success of FORGENIUS.tem and to extract the pieces of information he or she needs.
FORGENIUS is a very complex and heterogeneous action, bringing together scientists from multiple research fields, who were not used to share their research before, as well as a gradient of sensitivities from pure research to pure management. Multiple cogs, represented by the first six work packages, constitute an efficient and streamlined chain of transmission of information, from science to management and back. The ultimate goal of the project, like a flower at the tip of the stem of a flowering plant, is a new information system for the description of the network of Genetic Conservation Units, coupled with a user-friendly interface allowing the user to navigate unassisted through the sysWe are happy to announce that the collection of genomic, eco-physiological, environmental data that feed the new, multi-disciplinary, dynamic information system is following its course, and that the Information System, as well as the Query Interface, have already a close-to-final shape. This state of things will be apparent while reading this report. In other words, while we are only at the end of the second Reporting Period, corresponding to only 60% of project duration, we can already confidently state that FORGENIUS is delivering what it had promised. Much work remains to be done, and one cannot underestimate the practical hurdles that we have faced and that still lie ahead of us, yet the fact are there for everyone to see: at Month 36 out of 60, most of the expected outcomes are clearly sketched out, developed, and in some cases almost finalised. The reading of individual Work Package reports will duly account for this.
Saying that all partners have shown exceptional engagement in FORGENIUS is almost an understatement. Everyone has shown so far a bright will to reach their goals and co contribute to others’. Teams involved in each work package have shown a perfect understanding of how the different action get together to produce a coherent, high-quality final output. This is a great promise for the rest of the project, and it makes us confident that even more high standard, exciting action will happen during the final phase of the project.
WP1 has made great strides in the development of models allowing to connect high-throughput, remote-sensing data to tree and stand resilience, a necessary move to generalise the characterisation of the conservation network. WP2 has gathered vast amounts of information on the characters allowing trees to stand environmental challenges, linking back to WP1 and forward to WP3, which has made major advances on the determination of the genetic bases of such adaptive characters. WP4 has progressed in the genomic characterisation of the Genetic Conservation Units, and in the determination of the relevant evolutionary parameters helping track adaptive potential. WP5 has defined the backbone, structure, and code of the new EUFGIS Information System, and is already integrating the new data as they become available. WP6 has produced the beta version of the brand new, shiny query web application for the Information System. WP7 has vamped up the project’s communication with new, wide-impact actions such as the public webinars and the newsletter. All these actions have been tightly coordinated, while having their own autonomy, and contribute to the success of FORGENIUS.tem and to extract the pieces of information he or she needs.
The results obtained so far have already provided important breakthroughs in the characterisation of Forest GenRes. In particular, we've demonstrated the feasibility of fitting GCU-level model parameters in CASTANEA and SurEau. This means that GCUs can be distinguished based on their (modelled) functional characteristics. In addition to this, we've shown that it is feasible to use high-throughput, low-cost phenotyping methods (NIRS) to obtain proxies for traits that are hard to measure (and particularly, hydraulic traits). Such traits have shown variability among GCUs for the species analysed so far, which opens the question of their potentially adaptive meaning. These results indicate that functional traits are a necessary component of the indicators discriminating single GCUs, in addition to genetic and environmental data. The deepening of the analysis of GCU-level trait data and models is a major advance relative to the data, results and conclusions of previous projects, and in particular GenTree (2017-2020).