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• Forest assisted migration (FAM) is a strategy to align tree composition with changing climate. • FAM is risky because migrated individuals may be misaligned with climatic and site conditions. • DREAM fuses modelling, physiology, and silviculture research to reduce FAM risk. • DREAM modeled data identifies future adapted seed and forecasts FAM planting outcomes. • DREAM lab and field data inform FAM responses to novel abiotic and biotic conditions. Global change is reshaping climatic conditions at a tempo that exceeds natural migration rates for most tree species. As climate change amplifies the disparity between species' adaptive capacity and local climates, tree populations risk becoming geographically stranded in increasingly unsuitable conditions. This mismatch may cause catastrophic losses of key forest ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, habitat provisioning, and forest products. In response, forest managers and researchers are developing a suite of climate-adaptive strategies designed to sustain forest diversity and function. Among these, forest assisted migration (FAM) involves the movement of planting stock from source populations to locations either within or beyond their current ranges. The goal is to establish forests that can survive in today's climate and expected to thrive in future conditions, thereby sustaining ecosystem good and services. Because FAM is still in its infancy, implementation is limited by many uncertainties. Climatically derived seed sourcing is needed to ensure that planting stock possesses the ecophysiological amplitude to withstand both current and future climatic conditions at the destination site. Additionally, more knowledge about the impacts of local herbivores and intraspecific competition are needed because these drivers will co-regulate seedling success along with climate. Practically, these uncertainties must be addressed to instill in managers sufficient confidence that FAM investments will fulfill long-term management and societal goals relative to other silvicultural approaches. The Desired REgeneration through Assisted Migration (DREAM) framework is an international collaboration that uses basic and applied research to reduce these uncertainties and derive climate-informed planting approaches. DREAM is self-reinforcing in that each step in the process informs and strengthens subsequent phases. Namely, it sources seed in a climatically informed manner, experimentally tests this sourced stock to probe for physiological maladaptation under controlled settings, grows the stock in the field under a range of silvicultural scenarios, and finally forecasts long-term outcomes using models parameterized from the controlled- and field-tests. In this paper, we describe the DREAM framework and illustrate aspects of its implementation drawing from two experimental sites: one in Québec, Canada and one in Wisconsin, USA. Moreover, we place the DREAM study into the broader FAM context by briefly contrasting it with other operational examples throughout North America. Knowledge gained from this research-management collaboration will expand current reforestation paradigms to include future climate-adaptive ones that aim to use the right seed , planted in the right places , under the right conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]