PLANFORLAB Operational Group: Network of laboratory forests with improved plants to increase resilience and production in coniferous forests

In the territorial area comprising Galicia, Castile and León, and the Basque Country, coniferous forests occupy 1,550,000 hectares, creating the most significant coniferous forests in Spain, with an annual timber harvest of 7,773,935 cubic meters. However, forest fires, the incidence of pests and diseases, and the historically low price of coniferous wood have had very negative effects on the forest area devoted to coniferous cultivation. This has recently led to the disappearance or conversion of pine forests, which in turn has raised alarm in the timber industry, which sees the supply of quality coniferous wood to industrial production chains at risk in the medium term.

Furthermore, in recent years, especially in the last decade, a series of forest pathogens (fusarium, pine nematode, red and brown band nematode, among others) have emerged that lurk and affect these stands, potentially causing serious ecological damage and even the death of the pines that comprise them. These circumstances have a strong economic impact on the forestry sector. However, new plantations are often still not planted with suitable, high-quality genetically modified organisms. Furthermore, there are still not enough resistant organisms to these diseases, or their effectiveness in the field has not yet been proven. Solving this problem requires connecting the entire forestry sector so that all research advances are transferred to the rest of the forestry sector (nurseries, service companies, and landowners) as quickly as possible.

Therefore, it is vitally important to implement innovative projects involving research centers, companies, and landowner associations. These projects develop spaces, such as laboratory forests, to create research and demonstration plots where the behavior and adaptation of different MFRs to different climatic and soil conditions can be verified, as well as various resilient forestry itineraries in the face of climate change.