About this Research Topic

Background

Forest trees are a marvelous gift from nature, which produces a large supply of wood and nutritious foods for humankind. Forests provide significant ecological services for keeping our oceans, lakes, streams, and rivers healthy. Forest trees also play a critical function in carbon sequestration, purification of the atmosphere and production of healthy air. This rich source of biodiversity has also been attributed to the protection of the earth and humankind from natural disasters such as earthquakes, landslides, flooding events etc. Nevertheless, there are reports showing the alarmingly increasing rates of deforestation in different parts of the world. In addition, environmental stresses such as drought, cold, salinity, high temperature as well as pest and diseases affect tree growth, leading to a decrease in forest production with a negative impact on forest biodiversity and forest protection.

The negative impact of the abiotic and biotic factors such as drought, pests and pathogens on trees are evident at different at both cellular and molecular levels and include changes in genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics phenomena, histological changes, and morphological and physiological adaptations. Therefore, a better understating of the level of impact from environmental stresses and the mechanisms associated with stress resilience in forest trees in response to environmental stresses can help researchers find ways to mitigate the negative impacts of environmental stresses on the performance of forest trees in providing economic benefits and ecological services. This current research topic is focused on the studies, from gene to morphology, associated with the defense mechanisms of forest trees against both biotic and abiotic stresses. We hope that the findings of the accepted papers in this research topic will make solid contributions to a better understating of forest trees’ resilience mechanisms under environmental stress conditions, and towards the development of sustainable forestry.

We welcome submissions of article types published by Frontiers in Plant Science that contribute to environmental stress and tolerance mechanisms in forest trees including (but not limited to) the following subtopics:

• Understanding stress (abiotic and biotic) - related mechanisms in forest trees
• Using multi-omics tools to evaluate morphological, physiological, and biochemical changes of forest trees under stress conditions
• Forest tree growth regulators and signal transductions in response to adverse conditions
• Molecular, genetic, and transcript responses of forest trees to environmental stress conditions
• Recent transgenic approaches in forest trees in response to biotic and abiotic stress conditions

Keywords: forest trees, drought, salinity, cold, flooding, global warming, pest and diseases, gene and genomics, gene rewiring, RNA sequencing and transcriptomics, RNA interference, small RNA, proteomics, biochemistry, physiology, morphology, bioinformatics

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.

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