DYNAWOOD Dynamics of wood formation and adaptation of forest trees to climate variation

Coordinator of the consortium: Dr Philippe Rozenberg, Centre INRAE Val de Loire – FR

The objective of the DYNAWOOD project is to create a Studium Research Consortium for working on the dynamics of wood formation and the adaptation of forest trees to climate variation (DYNAmics of WOOD Formation, DYNAWOOD). The participants wish to exchange knowledge and experience for sharing and expanding skills, improving existing tools and developing new original studies on forest response to ongoing climate change based on the monitoring of stem size variations and the observation of wood formation. The first objective of DYNAWOOD is to develop a pilot study to test, compare and validate the use of dendrometer data for the assessment of the phenotypic plasticity of cambial response to climate and to use this information to study adaptation of forest trees to climate. The second objective of the project is to use already available data of the same nature and of different origins to study and test the possibility to realize large-scale analysis of cambial response to climate. The consortium is made up of five researchers and several collaborators from five institutes located in climatically different regions of the world (France, Switzerland, Canada, Mexico and Argentina covering oceanic, continental, mountain, boreal, tropical and sub-tropical climates) with complementary skills and access to very diverse tree species, experimental hardware and facilities, and already available data. DYNAWOOD aims at stimulating the production of research articles and will develop plans for future collaboration and applications.