By Denis Calnan

A couple of red pines in northeastern New Brunswick are the oldest of their kind in Atlantic Canada, by far, according to a professor and the New Brunswick Museum.

"These trees have lived 300 years," said Ben Phillips, the conservation scientist at the UNESCO Fundy Biosphere Reserve and a professor at Mount Allison University.

Stephen Clayden, a research curator and the head of the botany and microbiology section at the New Brunswick Museum, said that is very old for a red pine.

Future trees will still look like today's trees as the climate warms, but they're going to need a whole new set of genes.

"In my opinion the single biggest threat to Canada's forests is climate change," says forestry professor Sally Aitken.

"And there are things that we can change ... to make that forest more resilient in the face of climate change."

She's a forest geneticist at the University of British Columbia. This week she'll tell scientists, MPs and senators in Ottawa about the unseen differences among trees of the same species.