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As our climate continues to warm, heat and drought events are causing forest health issues, limiting growth and inducing tree mortality in British Columbia. As a result, forestry industry, is being impacted by timber devaluation and reforestation plantation failures. Such forest losses also have broad consequences as trees play an integral role in healthy forested ecosystems and indigenous cultures.

Adapting our planted forests to climate change means identifying trees that are resilient to climatic extremes at the earliest possible stage in the tree breeding programs that supply the province with planting material. However, current methods to detect resilient trees are too slow and costly. To provide a fast and reliable approach to scale up the evaluation of climate adaptation in tree breeding programs, the project team operationalized advanced remote sensing techniques to look at physiological and structural responses of Douglas fir and western redcedar trees to heat and drought.

The team established protocols to assess tree responses associated with changes in local climate, capturing winter baseline conditions as well as several phenological, heat and drought events. The project team created a quality control and data analysis pipeline for on-site climate data monitors and drone-mounted sensors, using statistical models in quantitative genetics software to estimate genetic parameters and detect relationships among traditional tree-size traits and remotely sensed climate-adaptive traits. This work provides the basis for future research linking novel traits with existing genomics data to further develop technology and genomic tools that will help tree breeders choose trees that are better able to cope with increasing heat and drought events.