In search of Fagus sylvatica: a trip through Turkey
| by Ivan Scotti (INRAE)
The morning sun rises through the haze after a cool night in Demirköy, in the north of Thrace, the portion of Türkiye that lies West of the Bosphorus strait; it’s been already two hours since the muezzin’s first call to prayer, aired by loudspeakers at four in the morning. The small town, sitting at an elevation of 300 m in the mountains, is both the destination of our long trip and the start of our sampling campaign.
When my colleague Maurizio Mencuccini, CREAF (Barcelona, Spain) and I had landed in Ankara three days before, on 12 June 2022, we did not imagine that our field work with Gaziomanpaşa University (Tokat, Türkiye) colleague and friend, Akkin Semerçi, would involve meeting so many interesting people, a dive into the innards of the Turkish forest management service, and so much help from people we had just met.
Our navigation through the various levels of forest administration started at the very top: a dense chat with Mr Ibrahim Yüzer, the deputy director of OGM (which stands for Orman Genel Müdürlüǧü, or General Directorate of Forestry), a branch of government that has existed since 1839. It was the opportunity to introduce to Mr. Yüzer the FORGENIUS project and to present our plans for characterising Turkish forest genetic resources. This is a crucial task: Türkiye is at the crossroads of multiple biogeographic regions, and harbours incredibly valuable biodiversity. Getting data about Turkish forests into the EUFORGEN information system is of great importance, as the ecological conditions Turkish forests experience today may lie ahead for many European forests.
Mr Yüzer agreed on the plan, and promised to open the doors of OGM to us, to provide help. After meeting him, off we went for a drive that covered half of Anatolia, to reach our next destination—Istanbul, a city so rich in magic and history that one can sense it as soon as one sets foot there. It was the next stage in our approach to our target, European beech (Fagus sylvatica) Genetic Conservation Unit (GCU) TUR00264, and our meeting point with Nicolas Mariotte (INRAE, Avignon, France), our professional tree climber and ecophysiology technician. There we had the opportunity to visit the local OGM desk, in the outskirts of the European part of Istanbul (the only city of the world belonging to two different continents), and to meet the botany & dendrochronology team (Prof Dr. Ünal Akkemik, Prof Dr. Nesibe Köse, Ass. Prof. Dr. Tuncay Güner) at the Istanbul University (itself founded no later than 1453 by Sultan Mehmet II, just the day after he had stormed what was then Constantinople). With the green light of the regional direction, obtained thanks to Prof. Akkin Semerçi’s subtle and patient negotiation skills, we then drove up the wide, sinuous roads that led us to our final destination.
The local OGM office was a delightful surprise of kindness, generosity, and professionalism. Mr. Salih Atmaca, the head of the local station, welcomed us—virtually without notice—in his comfortable office late in the afternoon, and immediately set out to help us identify the forest plot corresponding to the target GCU. We went through OGM’s very precise local plot maps with him, and had our answer in less than half an hour.
The availability and efficiency of OGM did not even stop there: just minutes later, two young forest guards were driving us, in a pick-up truck, up the forest tracks to go inspect the plot. A day that had started with a copious breakfast on a terrace hanging over the Bosphorus strait had ended, unexpectedly, measuring trees in the mountains at sunset. We even shared our dinner with our two guides, trading jokes through the language barriers—something that only happens when people are in the perfect mood for paying attention to perfect strangers.
The rest of the field work continued as smoothly as the day before: Mr Mariotte, clad in his high-tech gear, could easily climb the trees and collect samples, under the admiring and excited looks of our two young OGM companions, who soon started to also lend a hand treating the samples; and we lost track of Akkin Semerçi for several hours, while he was sampling a yew (Taxus baccata) GCU few kilometres away. The sampling had another surprise in store: the moist, foggy, cool environment was typical of Fagus sylvatica, yet the trees we were sampling looked way more Fagus orientalis. We finished the sampling anyway, curious to learn how different they would be from European beech, but we had the feeling that something had gone astray with the classification of the GCU as F. sylvatica. And yet, during a moment of rest, looking down at the forest litter, we spotted a typical European beech leaf. So the species we had come for must have been hiding somewhere in the forest, but it was perhaps so rare and scattered that we could not find it. A mystery that adds to the magic of this trip; because, as Akkin would say, “Turkey is different”.
