FUSION FOREST: a holistic approach for the design of disease-suppressing treescapes

Fusion Forest is a radically novel and interdisciplinary approach to design our future treescapes. We face a challenging scenario, where tree cover needs to be increased - the UK government has set out a 25-year programme to plant 180,000 hectares of trees by 2042 and to increase the woodland cover to 12% by 2060 - whilst there is an alarming increase in tree epidemics. These outbreaks, favoured by increased disease portability, chemical resistances and climate change, compromise the future of our woodlands, producing a dramatic loss of biodiversity and resources. We propose a proactive strategy where new plantations are designed from the onset to halt and suppress diseases using their natural immunity. Fusion Forest achieves so by cutting through discipline boundaries and establishing synergies among the latest discoveries and techniques in tree immunity, ecological modelling and fluids modelling. Fusion Forest seeks to understand how to stimulate priming of defence in trees by using careful combinations of species and lowering the disease pressure. In parallel, the project incorporates the often overlooked spatial component of forest canopies and uses forest heterogeneity to our advantage, creating physical barriers that complement and enhance the ecological ones. To do so, we design a new interdisciplinary modelling framework - named ForestFlow - that brings together forest growth models and computational fluid dynamics. The understanding gained from the ecophysical model, complemented by field and laboratory measurements, allows for a change of paradigm in the way we confront tree epidemics. The response to tree disease outbreaks is mostly reactive, focused on monitoring, chemical treatments and tree felling, with the subsequent environmental and economic costs. Working alongside our partners (landowners, woodland managers, technological companies and policy makers), Fusion Forest will provide the means to prepare forests for outbreaks ahead of their occurrence, reducing critically mitigation costs. Forecasting pathways of transmission opens the door to new strategies to halt the spread of pathogens, that will no longer be assumed to be inevitable. Combining physical and biological barriers for pathogens in our forests is a ground-breaking idea, and Fusion Forest will generate tools and specific guidance to ensure this synergy.