General Overview of Evoltree

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Antoine Kremer, the coordinator of EVOLTREE at INRA, was invited to provide a general overview of the objectives and structure of the Network of Excellence and to illustrate the scientific challenges and questions that the scientific community of EVOLTREE is addressing. He briefly introduced a new emerging discipline to which EVOLTREE is contributing to, i.e. ecosystem genomics. This new area of science results from the integration of different disciplines and it helps EVOLTREE examine trees and associated organisms such as phytofagous insects and mycorrhyzal fungi.

Dissemination Activities within Evoltree

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Barbara Vinceti (Bioversity International) gave a brief introduction to the dissemination activities undertaken within EVOLTREE, in particular those related to the establishment of a dialogue between the Stakeholders and EVOLTREE scientists. She also explained how Bioversity International is leading the implementation of dissemination activities within EVOLTREE.

Overview of the European Forest Policy Process

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Malgorzata Buszko-Briggs gave an overview of the European forest policy process, i.e. the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE). She presented the structure and historical background of the Ministerial Process and highlighted the declaration and two resolutions (Forest, Wood & Energy, and Forest & Water) made by the 5th Ministerial Conference held in Warsaw, Poland in November 2007.

Verifying the origin of forest reproductive material based in molecular markers

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Bernd Degen (Federal Research Institute for Rural Areas, Forestry and Fisheries, Institute for Forest Genetics, Grosshansdorf, Germany) gave a review on the scientific insight and technical solutions available to address the issue of verification of the origin of timber and forest reproductive material, with a special emphasis on improving forest management and contributing to fight illegal logging. This area of work is central to EVOLTREE research efforts and it is one of the most direct applications of genomic studies undertaken within EVOLTREE and other research projects.

Verifying the origin of tropical timber with DNA fingerprinting methods

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Reiner Finkeldey (Büsgen Institute, Department of Forest Genetics and Forest Tree Breeding, University of Göttingen, Germany) illustrated how molecular markers were used for wood identification of tropical tree species, specifically dipterocarps from South-East Asia. He showed which methods were adopted, the degree of success in DNA extraction and amplification, as well as the application of molecular markers to determine the origin of the material in a large study covering different regions of Indonesia.

DNA repository centre and centralized infrastructures

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Silvia Fluch (Austrian Research Centers GmbH - ARC, Vienna) presented part of the shared infrastructures established by EVOLTREE. She highlighted in particular the benefits deriving from the establishment of a joint DNA repository centre and other centralized infrastructures, which are valuable resources of strategic importance to address pan-European research questions and forest management issues. She presented examples of other European large-scale, shared resources and infrastructures, such as BioBanks containing biomedically relevant, quality-assessed samples of human DNA.