Assessing adaptive and plastic responses in growth and functional traits in a 10-year-old common garden experiment with pedunculate oak ( L.) suggests that directional selection can drive climatic adaptation.

Understanding how tree species will respond to a future climate requires reliable and quantitative estimates of intra-specific variation under current climate conditions. We studied three 10-year-old common garden experiments established across a rainfall and drought gradient planted with nearly 10,000 pedunculate oak ( L.) trees from ten provenances with known family structure.