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This paper examines how climate change agenda-setting is transforming French forest research. Historically structured around two communities – the silvicultural and the ecological one – forest research is moving under the guidance of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) towards the production of models that anticipate forest dynamics under future climates. This model-building imperative is carried by new actors – statisticians and modelers – whose complex models are central in the research organisation and funding. Those models are disrupting expertise territories of forest research communities. In order to maintain their jurisdiction, silvicultural and ecological communities are challenging the scientific relevance of those models which inform the evolution of forests by 2100. They are therefore seeking to push a different research agenda : a shift back to fieldwork, to experimentation and to historical data. This paper shows how the status and nature of modelling practices can be a decisive issue of demarcation between competing research communities.