Heartwood is dead tissue rich of extractives. Those extractives, especially stilbenes pinosylvin and its’ monomethylether, protect products made of heartwood against decay. Individual trees differ strongly from each other in the concentration of stilbenes in their heartwood, and thus also in the mass loss in decay tests. Great proportion of the measured variation in the concentration of stilbenes is inherited. Thus the progenies resemble their parents and siblings resemble each other. From the tree breeders point of view high heritability is useful. When desirable individuals are selected based on their measured values of stilbene concentration, high heritability determines that the individuals most probably have also desired genes in the selected trait. Breeding for chemical quality of Scots pine heartwood is very slow due to the late expression age of the trait, and because of the long rotation cycle. Thus we studied if the exploitation of the wide genetic variation in stilbene concentration could be speeded up by collecting seeds from those seed orchard clones that have been recognised to produce heartwood with high concentration of stilbenes. Material of this study consisted of seed orchard clones and their half-sib progenies growing in a field trial. This gave us an opportunity to compare the heartwood of the mothers to the heartwood of their children.
In the presentation we discuss the results showing that selective seed harvest from good clones would be a possible way to hasten the production of seedlings having an inherited ability to produce durable heartwood when grown up.
Keywords: heartwood timber, decay resistance, extractive concentration, Pinus sylvestris, seed orchard
Authors
Harju A.M.
Finnish Forest Research Institute, Metla, Punkaharju Unit, Punkaharju, Finland
Venäläinen M.
Finnish Forest Research Institute, Metla, Punkaharju Unit, Punkaharju, Finland,
Partanen J.
Finnish Forest Research Institute, Metla, Suonenjoki Unit, Suonenjoki, Finland
Kärkkäinen K.
Finnish Forest Research Institute, Metla, University of Oulu, Finland
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