Highlights of 2006-2007

• Field and laboratory work continued in the Wood Quality Study. Tree heights were measured on a subset of the unthinned trees at all three progeny test sites in the summer of 2006. Lumber testing continued during the fall of 2006, and wood disks were measured in the spring of 2007. Data analysis and candidate gene analyses are in progress.
• We continued the pruning treatments and collected flowering data in the spring of 2007 at Roseburg Resources’ Vaughn seed orchard in Lebanon. The timing of pruning seems to affect the number of flowers per tree. Graft maintenance continued at the other orchards.
• We published the first PNWTIRC Report on the Wood Quality Study entitled Genetic variation in wood quality in a clonal Douglas-fir seed orchard. We studied the genetics of wood stiffness (modulus of elasticity, MOE) in a clonal seed orchard of Douglas-fir. Indirect estimates of MOE were obtained using two tools that measure acoustic velocity in wood. The HM200 can be used to measure acoustic velocity and estimate dynamic MOE of logs, whereas the ST300 can be used to measure comparable traits on standing trees. We observed low to moderate individual-tree broad-sense heritabilities for HM200 velocity (0.27), HM200 MOE (0.36), and basic wood density (0.48), and our projections suggest that very high clonal mean heritabilities can be obtained by measuring relatively few ramets per clone. In contrast, clonal variation was nonsignificant for the ST300 traits. These results suggest that seed orchard trees can be used to measure wood properties and select genotypes with superior wood stiffness. Overall, it appears that the HM200 can be used to obtain rapid, inexpensive assessments of wood quality in breeding programs, and we recommend that additional comparisons of the HM200 and ST300 (or other standing tree tools) be conducted when trees are harvested in other seed orchards.
• PNWTIRC personnel completed four journal articles and reports (i.e., published or in press) and gave 10 presentations (see Appendices 1-2).
• The Early Flowering Study was completed with the publication of the results in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research [Cherry, M.L., Anekonda, T.S., Albrecht, M.J., and Howe, G.T. 2007. Flower stimulation in young miniaturized seed orchards of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii). Can. J. For. Res. 37:1-10].
• Glenn Howe co-organized the International Conference on Conifer Genomics, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, March 18-21, 2007 (with Dave Neale, Jeff Dean, and Mike Greenwood).

Full Report (pdf)