Plantations offer a high potential to respond to the increasing pressure on forests to deliver social, economic, and environmental services. Exotic tree species have a long history of use in plantation forestry, mostly because of their improved productivity compared with that of native species. Because of their impacts on land management and the environment, questions arise regarding the compatibility of exotic tree plantations with sustainable forest management (SFM), the overarching paradigm driving forest legislations in Canada. Our objectives were thus to i) briefly review the historical and current use of exotic tree species in Canada, ii) identify the social, economic and environmental issues related to the use of exotic tree species in Canadian forestry, based on sustainable forest management criteria, and iii) identify perspectives related to the use of exotic tree species in the sustainable management of Canadian forests. Results show that six out of ten Canadian provinces do not have specific legislations to control the use of exotic tree species for reforestation within their borders. The use of exotic tree species is mainly controlled through third-party certification agencies. Exotic tree species represent a small proportion of the planted seedlings in Canada and Norway spruce is the most common one. The use of exotic tree species is compatible with sustainable forest management criteria used in Canada, but forest managers must take into account several issues related to their use and maintain a social license to be entitled to plant them. Issues are highly dependent upon scale. The zoning of management intensity could provide environmental, economic and social benefits, but costs/benefits analyses should be carried out. The concept of naturalness could also be useful to integrate plantations of exotic species in jurisdiction where SFM strategies are based on ecosystem management principles. Monitoring of hybridization and invasiveness of exotic species must be included in landscape analyses to forestall loss of resilience leading to compromised structural and functional ecosystem states. The use of exotics species is recognized as a tool to sequester carbon and facilitate adaptation of forests to global changes, but it is necessary to carefully identified contexts where assisted migration is justified and disentangle planned novel ecosystems coherent with global changes generated by assisted migration from those emerging from invasive species forming undesired states.

It is widely accepted that the Mediterranean Basin is a prominent hotspot of biodiversity hosting a significant richness of plant lineages and fauna. Projected trends in the context of global change suggest this area will cope with strong increases in temperature and decreases in precipitation with consequent effects on forests and ecosystem services. Upward shifts of species range and/or mass extinction are expected to occur on a broad scale, especially in the Mediterranean. Here, mountain ecosystems would undergo the most severe reduction and fragmentation events. Further human based impacts aggravate the effects of global warming. Among them, wars and civil disorders seriously affect mountain landscapes, marking them over time. Presently, many threats of war are occurring in the Mediterranean and mostly in mountain areas at a high level of biodiversity. Furthermore, these same scenarios are overlapped with global warming, thus exposing many species to an actual risk of extinction.

The aim of this study was to find a solution to the disturbances created in the forest ecosystem by the consequences of war of an identified area in the Mediterranean basin. 

The three major functions of a potting medium for plant production is to provide support, to retain water and nutrients, and to allow oxygen diffusion to the roots. A potting medium should meet the requirements of practical plant production such as: to be available and ready at all times, easy to handle, lightweight and to produce uniform plant growth. Constituents such as natural soil, peat, sand, perlite and vermiculite are commonly used as substrates for container plant production. Nevertheless, these materials might be fully or partially replaced by various organic or inorganic wastes, thus achieving environmental and economic benefits. This study presents a synthesis of results extracted from many trials on waste materials as potting media substitutes for the seedlings production of the following native plant species: Pinus halepensis, Quercus ilex, Quercus macropleis and Ceratonia siliqua. The studied waste materials were either organic or inorganic components including: spoils of peridotite, raw rice hulls, coconut fiber and kenaf (the ground stem of the plant H. cannabinus L). The experimental potting media tested were: peat:perlite (3:1), a common medium used for seedling production, peat:spoils of peridotite (3:1), peat:rice hulls (3:1), peat:rice hulls (1:1), peat:coconut fiber (1:1), kenaf (100%) and kenaf:peat:rice hulls (3:1:1). The main physical (water retention characteristics, bulk density, particle density, total porosity) and chemical (N, K, Ca, Mg, soluble P, exchangeable cations, pH and loss on ignition) properties of each potting medium were measured. For each plant species the following seedling quality parameters were assessed: morphological characteristics (shoot height, root collar diameter), shoot and root biomass, Dickson's quality index and shoot and root nutrient concentrations. Then seedlings were planted in the field and their survival and growth was monitored. The feasibility of replacing peat or perlite with various waste materials as well as their effect on seedling quality and field performance are discussed.

Field trials were conducted in 2010 and 2011 to evaluate floristic composition of  weeds and the efficacy of pre herbicides in black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) nurseries. The weed population in both years was consisted mainly of annual spring and summer weeds, and some perennial weeds. The weediness in both years was relatively high. Weed density in the untreated control plots was 106.5 plants per m2 in 2010 and 87.4 plants per m2 in 2011. The most dominant weeds were Chenopodium album, Polygonum aviculare and Amaranthus retroflexus in 2010 and Polygonum aviculare, Tribolus terestris and Cynodon dactilon in 2011. By taxonomic aspect, the weed flora was distributed in 11 families. 15 weed species were dicotyledons and 2 weed species were monocotyledons. Terophytes were the dominant life form weed category in black locust nurseries. Efficacy of herbicides 28 days after treatment (DAT) ranged from 91.0% (pendimethalin) to 95.3% (linuron) in 2010, and 74.5% (linuron) to 88.0% (pendimethalin) in 2011, respectively. Efficacy of herbicides 56 DAT ranged from 93.6% (pendimethalin) to 98.3% (linuron) in 2010, and from 74.8% (linuron) to 83.1% (pendimethalin) in 2011, respectively. Prevailing weed control by herbicides was not consistent over the years. However, efficacy of herbicides in control of prevailing weeds 28 and 56 DAT ranged from 88% to 100% in 2010 and 7% to 86% in 2011, respectively. Lower herbicide efficacy in 2011 was most likely due to high precipitation occurred immediately after herbicide application and domination of perennial weeds, particularly Cynodon dactilon. 

The concern for environmental protection has existed since the time of first human civilization. As society develops, the chain of changes during the natural flow of processes in ecosystems has been supplemented by a new link – pollutants. They have an effect on all other members of the ecosystem (changes may be visible immediately or harder to spot), which leads to an extremely complex relationship with nature. The values of some parameters of pollutants reached an alarmingly high level. The tendency to reduce the risk of air, soil, water, plant, and animal pollution to a tolerable limit, which would salvage the environment and most importantly human health, became a global problem. Heavy metals as pollutants have been an interest of researchers for their conduct, especially in forest ecosystems, which has been expressed in the previous year's more than ever. With its numerous toxic effects, heavy metals are endangering the existence of plant species that live in already contaminated environments. This is all an argument regarding the fight of modern society that the emission of polluted materials gets reduced in order to avoid multiple negative effects, which can endanger the existence of living organisms in general, as an argument for the continuation of numerous researches that are conducted in this area. The monitoring of heavy metals is of significant importance because their toxicity and accumulations are vital for the ecosystem. Polluted soils can be reduced and they can restore their function using physical, chemical, and biological techniques. Physical and chemical methods are very expensive and cause mainly irreversible changes, thus destroying biological variety. The biological recovery of contaminated soil represents an efficient method of reducing health risks for both mankind and the ecosystem.  For this purpose, biological indicators are used. Numerous researches have led to improvements of the initial idea about using plants as a remediation of the environment and the removal of different contaminants from contaminated medias into promising technologies of environmental protection under the title “Phytoremediation”. This technology consists of the reduction of concentrations of polluted materials in polluted soils, water, or air. Plants have the ability to store, degrade, or eliminate metals, pesticides, solutions, explosives, and crude oils. Its derivatives and various other contaminants form mediums that contain them. This paper especially considers methods of the possibility of the usage and application of plants in restoring soil contaminated by heavy metals as well as other pollutants.  

Over the past five decades, researchers in the southern United States have been working with nursery managers to develop ways to reduce the cost of producing seedlings. In this regard, the Southern Forest Nursery Management Cooperative (at Auburn University in Alabama) has helped reduce hand-weeding costs and losses due to nematodes and disease. As a result, nursery managers are able to legally use a variety of registered herbicides and fungicides for use in pine and hardwood seedbeds. Other changes over the last three decades include a reduction in the number of nurseries growing seedlings, a reduction in the number of seedlings outplanted per ha, an increase in the number of container nurseries, an increase in the average production per nursery, an increase in production by the private sector, growing two or more crops after fumigation, the development of synthetic soil stabilizers, applying polyacrylamide gels to roots and the use of seedling bags and boxes for shipping seedlings.

Meeting forest restoration challenges relies on successful establishment of plant materials (e.g., seeds, cuttings, rooted cuttings, or seedlings, etc.; hereafter simply “seedlings”). The Target Plant Concept (TPC) provides a flexible framework that nursery managers and their clients can use to improve the survival and growth of these seedlings. The key tenets of the TPC are that (1) more emphasis is placed on how seedlings perform on the outplanting site rather than on nursery performance, (2) a partnership exists between the nursery manager and the client to determine the target plant based on site characteristics, and (3) that information gleaned from post-planting monitoring is used to improve subsequent plant materials. Through the nursery manager–client partnership, answers to a matrix of interrelated questions define a target plant to meet the reforestation or forest restoration objectives. These questions focus on project objectives; site characteristics, limiting factors, and possible mitigation efforts; species and genetic criteria; stocktype; outplanting tools and techniques; and outplanting window. We provide examples from the southeastern United States, Hawai‛i, and Lebanon on how the TPC process has improved performance of seedlings deployed for reforestation and forest restoration. 

Most of the Iberian Peninsula has a Mediterranean climate, which strongly determines the objectives, strategies and techniques of forest restoration. This communication addresses a main forest restoration challenge for Mediterranean-climate woodlands in Spain: the transformation of old monospecific pine plantations to more diverse, resistant and resilient forest systems. I also present how afforestation methods and some ideas on plant quality have evolved in the last 80 years. Productivity of Mediterranean forests is low, which discourages private owners to invest in woodland management. Therefore, woodland management strongly relies on public funds. Large-scale afforestation in the 20^th century has created huge areas of monospecific pine plantations, which have been under thinned and are very simple structurally with almost no understory. The stands are very prone to fires, diseases and drought dieback. However, old pine plantations can facilitate the establishment of late successional trees and shrubs when properly thinned. Therefore, pine plantations are an opportunity for restoring several types of oak-dominated forests at a large scale and resources should invested to preserve and gradually transform these plantations into mixed forests. Funds should be invested in thinning progressively rather than to plant new areas. In many plantations close to oak forests remnants, thinning is the only management required. However, many pine plantations are far from seed sources and enrichment plantations together with thinning are needed. Extensive enrichment plantations are expensive. Therefore, an option is to develop a network of small islets strategically placed inside pine plantations and properly managed as seed foci to foster pine plantation colonization. This option is cheaper than conventional extensive low-density enrichment plantations but research is needed to assess its effectiveness for pine plantation transformation.

This article focuses on the creation of seed sources for forest planting or seeding with a special focus on clonal seed orchards supporting planting Norway spruce and Scots pine in Sweden. Supporting long-term breeding and low input breeding is discussed. The focus is not on clonal forestry, although this is discussed. Natural regeneration is not dealt with and provenance choice only briefly. It is not a manual or literature review and focus on my own evaluations, but more detailed reviews can be found in the literature cited. It is intended to contribute some familiarity with many of the relevant genetic aspects on forest plantations.

In the keynote, major reforestation challenges in Scandinavia will be highlighted. The following countries make up Scandinavia: Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. For Iceland, with only a forest cover of 2%, a major reforestation challenge is the deforestation and overgrazing in combination with land degradation and extensive soil erosion. The challenges include the conflicts with livestock farmers. For centuries the commons were used for sheep and horse grazing. However, more and more of farmer grazing land have been fenced up, allowing the regeneration of birch and plantations of other species to increase. With a forest cover of 37% and 69% respectively, for decades a major reforestation challenge in Norway and Sweden has been the risk of seedling damages from the pine weevil. Unprotected seedlings can have a survival rate of less than 25% after being planted. Pine weevils feed on the bark of planted young seedlings at regeneration sites. If the seedling is girdled, it will not survive. In Sweden, and soon in Norway, pesticides have been forbidden. In the keynote, new methods and technology will be presented based on non-chemical protection. In Finland, with a forest cover of 75%, a major reforestation challenge is linked to the forest structure. The structure of Finnish forestry includes many private forests in combination with small regeneration sites. This implies a situation where logistics and methods for lifting and field storage provide a major challenge in order to preserve seedling quality until the planting date. Due to this situation, new logistic systems and technologies are being developed in Finland, including new seedling cultivation programs (including cultivation under Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs)) to match the access of fresh planting stock to different planting dates. In Denmark, with a forest cover of 13%, a major reforestation challenge is the possibility of future plantations based on a wide range of relevant species. For this to become a realistic option, new methods and technology have to be developed in reforestation activities that support this possibility. These methods and technology should make it possible to not be limited to certain species due to problems and restrictions during field establishment. This due to the prospect of establishing stable, healthy, and productive stands of various forest species that can be adapted to future climate change.