Yingmo Hu;Raul Antônio Sperotto;Georgios Koubouris;Srđan Stojnić;Nacer Bellalou

Institute of Lowland Forestry and Environment, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia;Crop Genetics Research Unit, Agricultural Research Service, USDA, Stoneville, US;Graduate Program in Biotechnology, Life Sciences Area, University of Taquari Valley - Univates, Lajeado, Brazil;Northeast Forestry University; Graduate Program in Plant Physiology, Federal University of Pelotas, Pelotas, Brazil;Laboratory of Olive Cultivation, Institute of Olive Tree, Subtropical Crops and Viticulture, Hellenic Agricultural Organization DIMITRA, Chania, Greece

Tree ecophysiology;Climate change;Climate hormesis;Phenology;Thermostability;Forest resilience;Hydraulics;FOREST

Forest structure and function strongly depend on and concurrently influence environmental conditions. Tree performance is generally governed by its genetics and environment; thus, recent hotspots in this field include tree genotype × environment, phenotype × environment, and functional trait × environment interactions. The editorial, review, and 22 original research articles in this Special Issue, “Tree ecophysiology in the context of climate change”, highlight ecophysiological phenomena (e.g., climate hormesis, seed germination, tree mortality), processes (e.g., tree metabolism, photosynthate allocation, nutrient uptake and transport), indicators (e.g., carbon sequestration, pollutants), measurements (e.g., thermal time methods, soil quality indices, vegetation spectral index, and near-infrared leaf reflectance), and modeling (e.g., climate correlations with tree growth, photosynthetic phenology, hydraulic strategies, OliveCan model) in the context of global climate change. Understanding forest–environment interactions from an ecophysiological perspective as climate changes provides insights into species fitness in suboptimal environments, species competition for limited resources, and phylogenetic divergence or convergence of species, and predicting species distributions.