Philipps University Marburg, Faculty of Biology, Plant Ecology and Geobotany, Karl-von-Frisch Strasse 8, 35043, Marburg, Germany.
Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Zürcherstrasse 111, 8903, Birmensdorf, Switzerland.
Gigascience. 2021 Mar 18;10(3). doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giab010.
Progress in the field of evolutionary forest ecology has been hampered by the huge challenge of phenotyping trees across their ranges in their natural environments, and the limitation in high-resolution environmental information.
The GenTree Platform contains phenotypic and environmental data from 4,959 trees from 12 ecologically and economically important European forest tree species: Abies alba Mill. (silver fir), Betula pendula Roth. (silver birch), Fagus sylvatica L. (European beech), Picea abies (L.) H. Karst (Norway spruce), Pinus cembra L. (Swiss stone pine), Pinus halepensis Mill. (Aleppo pine), Pinus nigra Arnold (European black pine), Pinus pinaster Aiton (maritime pine), Pinus sylvestris L. (Scots pine), Populus nigra L. (European black poplar), Taxus baccata L. (English yew), and Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl. (sessile oak). Phenotypic (height, diameter at breast height, crown size, bark thickness, biomass, straightness, forking, branch angle, fructification), regeneration, environmental in situ measurements (soil depth, vegetation cover, competition indices), and environmental modeling data extracted by using bilinear interpolation accounting for surrounding conditions of each tree (precipitation, temperature, insolation, drought indices) were obtained from trees in 194 sites covering the species' geographic ranges and reflecting local environmental gradients.
The GenTree Platform is a new resource for investigating ecological and evolutionary processes in forest trees. The coherent phenotyping and environmental characterization across 12 species in their European ranges allow for a wide range of analyses from forest ecologists, conservationists, and macro-ecologists. Also, the data here presented can be linked to the GenTree Dendroecological collection, the GenTree Leaf Trait collection, and the GenTree Genomic collection presented elsewhere, which together build the largest evolutionary forest ecology data collection available.
在进化森林生态学领域，表型鉴定树木在其自然环境中的分布范围一直是一个巨大的挑战，同时也受到高分辨率环境信息的限制。
GenTree 平台包含了来自 12 种具有生态和经济重要性的欧洲森林树种的 4959 棵树木的表型和环境数据：银冷杉（Abies alba Mill.）、银桦（Betula pendula Roth.）、欧洲山毛榉（Fagus sylvatica L.）、挪威云杉（Picea abies (L.) H. Karst）、瑞士五针松（Pinus cembra L.）、欧洲赤松（Pinus halepensis Mill.）、欧洲黑松（Pinus nigra Arnold）、欧洲黑杨（Populus nigra L.）、欧洲红豆杉（Taxus baccata L.）和栓皮栎（Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl.）。表型（高度、胸径、冠幅、树皮厚度、生物量、直度、分叉、分枝角、结实）、再生、原位环境测量（土壤深度、植被覆盖、竞争指数）和环境建模数据（利用考虑到每棵树周围环境的双线性插值提取），均来自分布在物种地理范围内的 194 个地点的树木，反映了当地的环境梯度。
GenTree 平台是研究森林树木生态和进化过程的新资源。在欧洲范围内 12 个物种的一致表型和环境特征分析，为森林生态学家、保护主义者和宏观生态学家提供了广泛的分析。此外，这里呈现的数据可以与 GenTree 树木年代学数据集、GenTree 叶片特征数据集和 GenTree 基因组数据集相链接，这些数据集共同构成了目前可用的最大进化森林生态学数据集。
