Conservation Genomics in Forest Ecosystems

Forest ecosystems cover nearly one-third of Earth’s land surface, hosting a wide diversity of plant and animal communities and providing multiple ecosystem services. However, human activities and ongoing climate change have severely fragmented forest habitats, reduced population sizes, and altered disturbance regimes, leading to a loss of genetic diversity. Furthermore, despite the growing recognition of genetic diversity as a fundamental component of biodiversity, underlying resilience to environmental change, forest conservation planning often overlooks genetic variation and even more rarely incorporates genome-wide information. This gap limits the effectiveness of conservation strategies by failing to safeguard the evolutionary processes that shaped the adaptive potential, leaving forests increasingly vulnerable to climate shifts, habitat fragmentation, pests and diseases.

In order to assist bringing this gap, this Research Topic aims to consolidate recent advances in conservation genomics applied to forest ecosystems, highlighting how genome-scale and genetic marker data can address key challenges such as identifying evolutionarily significant units, forecasting maladaptation under climate change, predicting responses of trees to biotic and abiotic stress, guiding assisted migration and seed sourcing for restoration, monitoring genetic erosion, and understanding the genetic consequences of forest management.

This Research Topic also embraces emerging challenges paradigms such as genome–environment associations, epigenetic contributions to adaptation, host–pathogen interactions, and the effect of hybridization and introgression on the adaptive potential of forest trees. Ultimately, this the Research Topic aims to bridge basic science and applied conservation by integrating genomic information with other types of data on the ecology and ecophysiology of trees and forest ecosystems, such as metabolomics, phenomics, enviromics and remote sensing.

We welcome manuscripts across all types (i.e., Original Research articles, Systematic Reviews, Methods, Reviews, Mini Reviews, Perspectives, Opinion articles, and Policy Brief) that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Assessment of neutral and adaptive variation in forest ecosystems using traditional genetic and modern genomic approaches;

• Landscape genomics, genotype–environment associations and genomic offset predictions in natural and planted forests

• Genomics informed forest conservation planning and prioritization;

• Restoration genomics (e.g., genomic-informed seed sourcing strategies and, assisted gene flow)

• Functional genomics and transcriptomics of abiotic/biotic stress resistance

• Genomics of host–pathogen and host–symbiont interactions

• Integration of genomic data with ecological niche models in forests;

• Multi omics and /big data integration through machine learning (e.g., genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, phenomics from remote sensing, soil metagenomics, enviromics etc.);

• Effects of forest management and forestry operations (e.g., thinning, clear cutting, fire regimes) on genomic diversity and population structure;

• Phylogenomics for the conservation of rare, endemic or cryptic lineages

Studies should have a clear conservation or management outcome.

Submissions on any forest plant species, from keystone trees to rare understory herbs, are welcome.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: conservation genomics, forest ecosystem, genome–environment associations, ecophysiology, metabolomics, phenomics, enviromics, Phylogenomics, planted forests, natural forests, remote sensing, forest management, forest conservation

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.