Regions of provenance of european beech ("Fagus sylvatica" L.) in Europe

The European Council Directive 1999/105/CE, concerning the marketing of forest reproductive material, establishes a Region of Provenance as the basic unity for trading tree reproductive materials (fruits, seeds or plants) and defines it as “the area or group of areas subjected to sufficiently uniform ecological conditions in which stands or seed sources showing similar phenotypic or genetic characters are found”. The identification of Regions of Provenance is a crucial issue for a sustainable management of forests that includes activities linked with forest trees propagation, including afforestation or in situ genetic conservation. The European experience in the regionalization of management of forest genetic resources comes from the delineation of provenance regions and breeding zones at country level and is based mainly in geo-climatic variation. Following this, it should be of great interest to include all information at country level in a wide dataset at European level. One of the goals of AC TREEBREEDEX and the COST Action E52 is to summarize the knowledge on patterns of geographic variation of European trees in adaptive traits, and Fagus sylvatica is a good example of a tree species with a wide distribution and use. We show a cartographic synthesis of information relative to the European Provenance Regions of European beech along sixteen countries, and a table relating main delimitation methods established by each country.