Feedback by Azurra Pistone

By: Azurra Pistone

I found the summer school on assisted migration extremely valuable for both my doctoral studies and professional development. It gave me the opportunity to meet many researchers, practitioners, and representatives of different organizations (public and private) working on topics closely related to assisted migration and to my research.  

The summer school provided me with a multifaceted introduction to assisted migration, from novel methods of high-throughput phenotyping and their application in stress analysis to pollen-based assisted migration, from traditional provenance trial methods to their most recent application. We also had an introduction to SDMs and their application in assisted migration.

What I appreciated most was the strong connection between research and forestry; the instructors provided not only scientific methods but also ways to communicate research findings to stakeholders and practitioners. They presented their tool, Seed4Forest, and discussed both its applications and challenges encountered during its development. Although we did not spend a lot of time on this, they provided us with many tools to explore it further on our own.

The knowledge and skills I gained will be particularly useful in the final chapter of my PhD, in which I’ll analyze data from the citizen science project MyGardenOfTrees. I believe that I’ll use the information that I learned about the analytical approaches (data selection and production, where we possible methodological improvements, ...) as well as the insights about communicating the results to foresters and other stakeholders.