Integrating evolutionary genomics of forest trees to inform future tree breeding amidst rapid climate change.

ABSTRACT

Global climate change is leading to rapid and drastic shifts in environmental conditions, posing threats to biodiversity and nearly all life forms worldwide. Forest trees serve as foundational components of terrestrial ecosystems and play a crucial and leading role in combating and mitigating the adverse effects of extreme climate events, despite their own vulnerability to these threats. Therefore, understanding and monitoring how natural forests respond to rapid climate change is a key priority for biodiversity conservation. The recent progress of evolutionary genomics, primarily driven by cutting-edge multi-omics technologies, offer powerful new tools to address several key issues. These include the precise delineation of species and evolutionary units, inference of past evolutionary histories and demographic fluctuations, identification of environmental adaptive variants, and measurement of genetic load levels. As the urgency to deal with more extreme environmental stresses grows, understanding the genomics of evolutionary history, local adaptation, future responses to climate change, and the conservation and restoration of natural forest trees will be critical for research at the nexus of global change, population genomics and conservation biology. In this review, we explore the application of evolutionary genomics to assess the effects of global climate change using multi-omics approaches and discuss the outlook for breeding climate-adapted trees.