Forest plantations play an important role in maintaining a supply of high-quality timber from managed forest. With an expected increase in the prevalence of drought in some forested areas, climate change increases concerns about future seedling growth. A promising approach to promote the suitability of plantation seedlings to current and future climate would be to use variation in growth and wood traits of trees under drought as selection criteria in tree breeding programs, especially at a young stage when they are most vulnerable to drought. We evaluated the genetic control of the growth and wood density response of white spruce clonal seedlings submitted to various drought conditions in a greenhouse experiment. By varying the watering treatment of 600 two year-old seedlings from 25 clones, we simulated three levels of drought-induced stress during two growing seasons. Apical and radial growth decreased markedly as the intensity of drought increased, whereas wood density tended to increase. We also developed a woody biomass index composed of wood density and ring area, which was observed to decrease slightly with increasing drought. There was important variation in all traits among clones and heritability tended to decrease with the intensity and duration of drought-induced stress, mainly for wood density and radial growth. However, the heritability of apical growth tended to increase under drought conditions. Our results show that the response of young white spruce clones to drought is highly variable, and together with the significant levels of heritability noted, the results indicate that multi-trait genetic selection for drought stress response at a young age could represent a promising approach to increase resilience to drought.
Conifer breeding programmes are increasingly selecting for wood quality in addition to growth so to ensure a sufficient flow of high-quality fibre from future forest plantations. As wood density is one of the most frequently used indicators of wood quality, there is a growing interest to consider this trait in selection, and thus enhance the properties of end-use products from planted trees. However, wood density varies at different scales within trees, with pith-to-bark patterns and year-to-year fluctuations representing two important sources of variation. From both physiological and end-use points of view, it is desirable to produce stems with limited pith-to-bark and year-to-year wood density variation. In the present study, we assessed patterns of pith-to-bark and year-to-year variation in 2196 wood density patterns and evaluated the genetic control of traits characterizing this variation. The experimental data came from a 15-year-old white spruce genetic trial representing 93 full-sib families replicated in two contrasting environments in Quebec, Canada. To separate pith-to-bark from year-to-year variation, non-linear models were developed to describe pith-to-bark patterns of variation in the mean ring density (MRD) of individual trees as well as for latewood density (LWD) and latewood proportion. We observed that pith-to-bark variation was more under genetic control than year-to-year variation, for which only LWD and proportion of latewood width to overall ring width reached moderate genetic control. Little genotype-by-environment interaction was observed although wood density patterns differed significantly between sites. The present approach could help identify trees or families that tend to have limited pith-to-bark and year-to-year variation in wood density as part of tree genetic improvement programmes to provide future trees with more uniform and desirable wood attributes.
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