Abstract Tomorrow’s forests face extreme pressures from contemporary climate change,
invasive pests, and anthropogenic demands for other land uses. These pressures, collectively,
demand land managers to reassess current and potential forest management practices.
We discuss three considerations, functional restoration, assisted migration, and
bioengineering, which are currently being debated in the literature and have the potential to
be applied independently or concurrently across a variety of scales. The emphasis of
functional restoration is to reestablish or maintain functions provided by the forest
ecosystem, such as water quality, wildlife habitat, or carbon sequestration. Maintaining
function may call upon actions such as assisted migration—moving tree populations within
a species current range to aid adaptation to climate change or moving a species far outside
its current range to avoid extinction—and we attempt to synthesize an array of assisted
migration terminology. In addition, maintenance of species and the functions they provide
may also require new technologies, such as genetic engineering, which, compared with
traditional approaches to breeding for pest resistance, may be accomplished more rapidly
to meet and overcome the challenges of invasive insect and disease pests. As managers
develop holistic adaptive strategies to current and future anthropogenic stresses, functional
restoration, assisted migration, and bioengineering, either separately or in combinations,
deserve consideration, but must be addressed within the context of the restoration goal.