The FORESTTRAC roadmap was well received and supported at the stakeholder event in Brussels on October 26^th2011, where it was presented to a range of forest experts and to staff of the European Commission. EC representation included DG Research and Innovation and DG Agriculture.

Most importantly, the discussions focused on how best to assemble future funding from both North America and Europe to take the roadmap forward to future research projects. This is a considerable challenge with such a wide range of funding mechanisms operating with different timetables and selection criteria. A major conclusion was that while scientists readily cooperate and collaborate across the Atlantic, agreeing to share their resources, infrastructure and knowledge to tackle big issues such as climate change, this is currently not the case in funding.

Project coordinator Antoine Kremer from INRA, France said he was pleased with the meeting, with clear dissemination of the FORESTTRAC results and a useful flow of information on funding and strategy from the gathered EC representatives. One key piece of advice in order to be competitive within the Horizon 2020 future framework programme – to assemble as much forest industry lobbying as possible in favour of projects flowing from the roadmap and to emphasise the innovatory elements of proposed research.

The meeting spent time discussing the roadmap's matrix which plots future research areas of emphasis with regard to adaptation of forests to global changes, combining more traditional approaches with advanced genomic tools. Delegate suggestions for priority ranged from a concentration of effort on genes, traits and fitness of trees in relation to climate and environment change through to a work priority on Southern European/Mediterranean forests.

So, what might a research project flowing from FORESTTRAC look like? A likely focus, says Antoine Kremer, is work on the basic evolutionary mechanism for trees to adapt to future environmental change.

"We have evidence that these mechanisms are active because they contributed in the past to adaptation during natural global warming. We now need to evaluate how they will operate in different ecological settings in North America and Europe", he says.

Other speakers in Brussels included Reiner Finkeldey, Georg-August University, Göttingen, Germany. He pointed out that besides global warming there are other multiple pressures on forests at a global level, including the growing human population and the need for ever higher forest productivity. Genomics has a key role to play here, especially with the realization that with global warming, the environment is variable in both space and time. "The main future challenge is to understand genotype and environment interactions in complex ecosystems where genomic tools will help", he says.

From AIT in Austria, Silvia Fluch talked about existing research infrastructures in forest ecosystem genomics research and the progress made in addressing the legal aspects of information and material sharing in such earlier projects as Evoltree. Angela Baker from INRA Transfert in Paris briefed the meeting on possible support for transatlantic research cooperation including information on NSF (National Science Foundation) in the US, Genome Canada and the EC.

Following the Brussels meeting and its delegate input, the final draft of the roadmap will be ready in March 2012. After that there will be further dissemination work and an effort to match with topics in forthcoming rounds of EU project calls and North American funding.