Background
Trees4Future will make a significant contribution to helping the European forestry sector respond, in a sustainable manner, to increasing demands for wood products and services (among which preservation of forest biodiversity) in a context of changing climatic conditions.
To do so Trees4Future will integrate for the first time major, yet rarely interacting forestry communities (and their resources) from geneticists to environmentalists and from communities working at the tree/population scale to those working at forestry landscape/wood basin levels as well as industry concerns. These scientific communities will combine their complementary infrastructures, tools and knowledge and thus fill in the current gaps:
- physical environment vs genetics
- basic wood properties vs end-products quality
- individuals to forests scales of study
This collaboration will result in a holistic approach to integrating abiotic and biotic environmental aspects through biological responses (eco-physiological and pest/disease risk studies), biomass production (breeding and silviculture) and industrial technology (wood quality and technology).
The long-term objective of Trees4Future is to provide not only the partners but the whole European forestry community, with an easy and comprehensive access to complementary but currently scattered sources of information and expertise to optimise the short and long-term exploitation of the forest resources by both the research community and the socio-economic players. Providing access to the wider research community to a wide variety of forestry research infrastructures (from state-of-the-art analytical tools to predictive models) via the project will enable Trees4Future to improve, coordinate and validate its offer to European and international researchers from both public and private sectors and thus ensure the future sustainability of the consortium as well as that of the wider European forestry community at large.
