Species of chestnut (Castanea spp.) are naturally widespread
throughout temperate forests of the northern hemisphere in Asia,
Europe, and North America. Populations have been naturalized outside
of species’ native ranges in Europe, North America, South America and
Oceania. The wide diffusion on a planetary level over tens of millions of
years has resulted in high genetic variability within the genus and spe-
cies adaptations to disparate environmental conditions (Dane et al.,
2003; Mellano et al., 2012; Krebs et al., 2019). Perhaps more than many
other tree species, the history of chestnut has been closely linked to
human civilizations who utilized chestnut as an agricultural and forest
resource over millennia. Chestnut species have had important cultural
significance for Indigenous communities, although much Traditional
Ecological Knowledge has been lost (Barnhill-Dilling and Delborne,
2019), and chestnut species have been subjected to challenges of the
contemporary Anthropocene, from globalization to climate change. Al-
terations to disturbance regimes, particularly related to drought and
fire, and the introduction of nonnative pests and pathogens, have
reduced genetic diversity and population densities, particularly for
species in North America, Europe, and western Asia (Mellano et al.,
2012; Dalgleish et al., 2016). Forest management practices, genomic
tools, tree breeding, and prediction models have been developed and
tested to meet these challenges (Jacobs et al., 2013; Fernandes et al.,
2022). Most strategies, however, are underdeveloped and species spe-
cific, including for American chestnut (Burnham et al., 1986; Ana-
gnostakis, 2012; Fei et al., 2012) and sweet chestnut (Conedera et al.,
2016; Manetti et al., 2019; Marcolin et al., 2020; Patrício et al., 2020). A
global perspective for chestnut sustainability, conservation, and man-
agement has largely been missing in the literature, excluding pro-
ceedings from International Chestnut Symposia (e.g., Double and
MacDonald, 2014).
