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2023-2028 trial participants: observations start on 1 September
This page has short articles about scientific topics related to the research of MyGardenOfTrees intended to a broad audience from scientist from different fields, foresters, and intererested citizens
October 2025
You make the difference: Citizen Science in MyGardenOfTrees
You make the difference: Citizen Science in MyGardenOfTrees
What is citizen science?
When we talk about citizen science, we mean research that relies on data collected by people outside traditional scientific institutions. It is a way of opening science to society, while also reaching scales of observation that would be impossible for researchers alone.
Citizen science has deep roots. In some countries, these efforts began more than two hundred years ago. For example, the ladybird beetle observation network in Belgium started in 1800, and has ammassed over 80'000 records since then! Similarly, the phenology observation network in Austria has been active intermittently since 1851. In these early projects, citizens followed demanding protocols, repeated observations, or even manipulated specialized equipment. However, the geographic reach of their observations remained limited.
Over time, technological advances such as the internet and smartphones, have transformed what citizens science can do. Today, many projects reach thousands of people across countries or even continents, asking for simpler data or even just photographs - think about the famous iNaturalist network.
From local projects involving a handful of engaged volunteers, citizen science has evolved into large-scale initiatives that gather valuable yet straightforward data from thousands of participants across countries and professions — often with nothing more than a smartphone. What about MyGardenOfTrees?
MyGardenOfTrees is different.
What is next-generation citizen science?
MyGardenOfTrees brings citizen science to the realm of coordinated distributed experiments (CDEs) where collaborating teams run experiments across multiple locations while following the same protocol. Achieving such broad temporal and spatial scale while managing complex experiments is challenging, but MyGardenOfTrees meets this challenge by engaging professionals who contribute meaningfully to research and help translate findings into policy and action. This collaborative approach is built on several key strengths:
Next-generation citizen science: when citizens and scientists co-create sustainable solutions. NGCS proposes highly engaging work to citizens that aligns with their profession. For example, in MyGardenOfTrees, foresters and forest scientists cooperate to perform an Europe-wide experiment to advise assisted migration decisions.
Sustained participation: MyGardenOfTrees participants return to their micro-gardens repeatedly, monitoring seed germination, survival, and growth across seasons and years.
Active experimentation: Participants don’t just observe nature — they conduct experiments by sowing seeds from different provenances under controlled conditions.
Protocol fidelity and complexity: participants follow standardized protocols for data collection, ensuring that results are directly comparable across hundreds of sites.
Spatial diversity: With micro-gardens spread across Europe the project captures plant responses across a broad climatic and environmental gradient.
Temporal depth: Because observations are repeated over multiple years, the data offers rare insight into early forest dynamics under climate change.
All this is possible thanks to the engagement of a very special group of participants: foresters. They bring both practical experience and professional knowledge allowing them to carry out complex experimental tasks while having a genuine stake in the outcomes.
This collaboration places MyGardenOfTrees within what we call next-generation citizen science (NGCS), initiatives where participants bring specialized expertise and take an active role in structured, hypothesis-driven research. As the figure above illustrates, MyGardenOfTrees sits at the interface between traditional citizen science and fully coordinated distributed experiments conducted by scientists, pushing the boundaries of what participatory science can achieve.
Scientists and foresters co-create sustainable solutions
The strength of scientific conclusions depends directly on the quality and consistency of the data behind them.
In MyGardenOfTrees, every observation you record contributes to building a unique, continent-wide dataset on seed germination and seedling growth under different environmental conditions. The observations originated in the coordinated network of micro-gardens will be essential to test how silver fir and beech respond to climate variation – information that will ultimately support decisions about forest adaptation and assisted migration.
What can we learn from this for citizen science in general?
Structure matters – Clear, standardized protocols and training materials make sure that data collected across hundreds of sites remain comparable.
Community matters – People stay engaged when they feel part of a shared scientific journey, not just when submitting a single measurement.
Feedback matters – Sharing updates and early insights (like in this blog or in the results page of this website) strengthens motivation and reminds participants that every observation has value.
These principles show that citizen science is most powerful when it becomes a collaboration between citizens and researchers built on shared purpose and trust.
Your engagement has already demonstrated that citizen science can reach a new level of rigor and commitment. As data collection continues, your observations will form the foundation for understanding how trees establish, grow, and survive under different climates.
This knowledge will be critical for addressing one of the most pressing questions in modern forestry:
How can we use scientific evidence to guide assisted migration and help forests adapt to the conditions of the future?
Together, we’re proving that citizen science is not just about participation — it’s about co-creating the science that will help sustain our forests.
June 2022
Assisted migration or assisted gene flow?
Assisted migration or assisted gene flow?
Humans have been moving around species for centuries
Assisted migration (AM) is the human-aided movement of individuals to a new location. Foresters and gardeners have even been translocating plants since centuries, and some of these introductions have led to continental scale spread of non-native species. For example, black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) was introduced to Europe principally for soil stabilization, honey making and quality hard wood. While it still delivers these important ecosystem services, it presents risks of invasiveness in high biodiversity native grasslands. The risks and benefits balance of these translocations is often unclear, AM is increasingly proposed as an “active” conservation and climate change adaptation strategy for forest trees.
Assisted migration (AM): what is behind the word?
AM could imply various types of human intervention (Fig. 1, Scenarios) that entail very different benefits and risks. The “ingredients” of AM are a Host and a Donor population that can have different biological characteristics (Fig. 1). The host population is a collection of individuals of a species of a given region that reproduce with one another that is under some real or perceived threat of environmental change. The donor population is also a collection of individuals of a species (either the same as the host or different) at a different geographic location that is considered, based on some direct or (mostly) indirect evidence, good candidate to replace or be mixed with the host population.
In the case of black locust, since there are no native relatives of the species in Europe, its introduction may be referred to as Assisted Colonization. Here, the benefits were principally economic: honey production, soil stabilization and wood production. Concerning the risks, black locust can become a threat to a whole ecosystem, such as in the case of the high diversity grasslands, accompanied with a high risk of invasiveness.
Fig. 1. Characteristics of different types of assisted migration and their risks and benefits.
Assisted gene flow: the risks and benefits are inherently genetic
When the host and donor populations are genetically similar (or related) to each another, we are talking about assisted gene flow (AGF). The name refers to its aim, which is “moving genes” of the donor population so they integrate to the host population after some generations of inter-breeding (called introgression). The risks and benefits are principally related to the hybridization between two populations. Under AGF, the often controversial economic benefits of AM are not relevant: the translocation is motivated by preserving the ecosystem in a state as close as possible to its current state, thus with all its biodiversity and its functions. We hope to achieve this by manipulating the foundation species of the ecosystem only. Further, under AGF, the risks of invasiveness or importing diseases and pests or even collapse of a whole ecosystem, are minimal. In contrast, the major benefit of AGF are outbreeding depression and hybrid incompatibility. The understanding of these risks often requires long term experimental research and understanding of evolution and genetics, which can make knowledge transfer difficult. Very briefly, when populations that had an independent evolutionary history for a long period of time, their genetic material could develop in a direction that when member of these populations interbreed, their survival and growth is low, lower than that of the parental populations.
May 2022
Provenance trial and micro-gardens: What is the difference?
Provenance trial and micro-gardens: What is the difference?
Provenance trials
Provenance trials are used to compare growth traits of different provenances thus established for up to 50 years or more.
Seeds collected in the autumn are dried and stored until the following spring or for a later year
Seeds are stratified artificially to break the seed dormancy.
Seeds are grown to seedlings in an ideal and controlled environment of a nursery (1).
The long-term planting sites are prepared to receive the young seedlings (2) after extensive soil preparation (3).
Given the extensive work and space requirements, provenance trials are established at limited number of locations (4).
Micro-gardens
Micro-gardens are used to compare the growth and regeneration capacity of different provenances and families across many different environments
Seeds are collected in the autumn and sent to forester participants.
Seeds are placed in the forest without soil preparation (1 & 2).
The untreated seeds are directly planted into the soil (Fig 2).
The seeds/seedlings are left undisturbed. The only treatment provided is protection from mice/birds predation (Fig 3).
MyGardenOfTrees trials are established in forests at multiple locations within and beyond the natural range of the species.
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