We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the concerns of O'Neill et al. (2025) regarding our recent opinion paper in Global Change Biology (Chludil et al. 2025). There, we proposed a novel approach to assisted migration (AM) in forest trees, shifting the focus from the conventional translocation of seeds or seedlings to the transfer of pollen. Specifically, we suggested using seed orchards (SOs) to collect pollen from source populations and
produce seeds in target regions.