Long-lived forest species represent one of the best examples of adaptation to permanently changing environments. Tolerance to desiccation was the first challenge in the evolution of terrestrial plants and boosted the development of strategies and physiological mechanisms to cope with drought. As water availability is the main determinant of species' distribution and productivity together with temperature, plant drought responses are critical to understanding tree species success, productivity, and resilience to periods of water shortage. Ongoing global changes are associated with a rise in temperatures and an increased frequency of heatwaves, and intense droughts with crucial consequences on forest structure and functions. Moreover, land-use changes decrease the size of populations and threats species genetic variability, especially in relict populations. The future of forest species to these changes will be determined by their capacity to acclimate, adapt or migrate.

Adaptation to drought involves multiple traits, complex interactions, and tradeoffs that vary within and among species, and change at different scales. Accordingly, adaptation to drought has been extensively studied at multiple levels of organization: from community ecology to molecular biology and from whole plant ecophysiology to organs or tissues.

The understanding of forest species adaptations to drought has major implications in basic and applied science, from informing fundamental ecological theory explaining species distribution and interactions to predicting and modeling local and global responses to global change and implementing effective ecological restoration.

Recent advances of high throughput noninvasive technologies, including new image methods, and new mechanistic models of water transport in the continuum soil-plant-atmosphere represent a unique opportunity to disentangle the complex interplay between drought-adapted phenotype and genotype. The combination of -omics approaches with in situ physiological measurements should enlighten the molecular basis of adaptation to drought in forest tree species, but also the heritability of major traits related to drought adaptation. To this end, faster phenotyping of a large number of populations/species will facilitate the incorporation of variation in adaptive traits among species/habitats which may inform Dynamic Global Vegetation Models.

International Journal of Pure and Applied Zoology is now accepting submissions on this topic. A standard EDITORIAL TRACKING SYSTEM is utilized for manuscript submission, review, editorial processing and tracking which can be securely accessed by the authors, reviewers and editors for monitoring and tracking the article processing. Manuscripts can be uploaded online at Editorial Tracking System (https://www.scholarscentral.org/submissions/international-pure-applied-zoology.html) or forwarded to the Editorial Office at zoology@peerreviewedjournals.com.

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International Journal of Pure and Applied Zoology
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