, 2011). The potential of restored forests to become seed sources for future restoration activities should be taken into consideration when planning restoration, especially for rare, endemic or endangered species for which the availability of suitable FRM is often very limited. Efforts should be made to avoid the successive use of seed collections from planted stands with low genetic diversity (e.g., Lengkeek et al., 2005 and Pakkad et al., 2008), as this may exacerbate the effects of a narrow genetic base in this website subsequent populations.

Maintaining records of the sources of FRM is essential, as it will inform decisions about future collection and management. Such records will also allow lessons to be learned about the site-adaptability and viability of the original FRM used as the restored forests mature and the fitness of populations can be evaluated (Rogers and Montalvo, 2004, Godefroid et al., 2011 and Breed et al., 2013). Tree populations face three possible fates under changing environmental conditions: (i) they may persist if the changes remain within the range of their plasticity or they are able to track appropriate ecological niches through migration; (ii) they may persist through adaptation to new environmental conditions where they currently grow; or (iii) they may be extirpated

(Aitken et al., 2008). These same fates apply to tree-based ecosystems in the process of being restored. Given Selleck GSK1349572 the uncertainty of future climatic conditions

and lack of knowledge of the nature and distribution of adaptive traits in tree species, several measures have been suggested to build resilience to climate change into forest restoration initiatives. Such measures include increasing population sizes, enhancing Wilson disease protein species and genetic diversity, ensuring the maintenance of tree cover in the landscape for genetic and geographic connectivity between tree populations, and identifying and protecting evolutionary refugia (Ledig and Kitzmiller, 1992, Aitken et al., 2008, Sgrò et al., 2011, Bhagwat et al., 2012 and Pauls et al., 2013). The process of natural selection, necessary for adaptation to occur in place, depends upon population size, amount of variation among individuals, selection pressure and gene flow from neighbouring populations. Thus, the adaptive potential of a tree population in the process of being restored can be expected to correlate positively with its size, at least on the assumption that appropriate reproductive material has been used (i.e. representing sufficient adaptive genetic variation) (Reed and Frankham, 2003 and Sgrò et al., 2011). Maintaining evolutionary potential – the ability of populations to both persist over the long term and undergo evolutionary adaptation in response to changing environmental conditions – depends on large, effective population sizes (Sgrò et al.