ForestPredX

Infrastructure Grant with the Swiss Data Science Center

Time frame: 1 September 2026 - 30 September 2027

WSL project team:

Dr Katalin Csillery, PI

Azzurra Pistone, PhD student

Summary:

In a rapidly changing climate, selecting optimal forest tree seed sources is critical for building climate-resilient forests. The ERC CoG project MyGardenOfTrees established large comparative trials and generated novel genomic data to develop a prediction tool supporting climate-adapted forest seed selection in Switzerland and across Europe for two species complexes. This tool uniquely integrates gene-environment interactions and trait correlations, bringing a personalized-medicine approach to forestry. Switzerland plays a central role as the coordination hub and hosts the highest number of trial sites.

ForestPredX will deliver the data infrastructure and web interface as a minimum viable product (MVP) to operationalize this tool for forest owners, national forest services, breeders, and researchers. The MVP platform will comprise automated data ingestion from citizen-science trials, curated genomic and environmental data, prediction-model services, and a web-based user interface. Predictions will be served through a hybrid approach that combines a precomputed prediction layer for common climate scenarios and soil maps to support fast map-based queries, with on-demand prediction for user-defined points or polygons.

The platform will be implemented as a modular, containerized system hosted on Swiss research infrastructure, ensuring portability and long-term sustainability. It will be designed to integrate additional trials and genomic resources, enabling a community-driven, evidence-based system for climate-resilient forest adaptation. Open-source components will support reuse in other citizen-science-driven prediction applications.