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Modern Advances in Tree Breeding

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Challenges and Opportunities for the World's Forests in the 21st Century

Part of the book series: Forestry Sciences ((FOSC,volume 81))

Abstract

Traditional tree improvement programs are long-term endeavours requiring extensive resources. They require establishing mating designs, installing progeny tests on multiple sites to evaluate parents and their offspring over large geographic areas, monitoring those tests over extended periods of time, and eventual analysis of measurements to assess economic traits. Most tree breeding programs follow the classical recurrent selection scheme, resulting in the generation of multiple breeding and production populations. This process, while successful in attaining appreciable gains, remained static for a long time. The availability of plentiful, reliable, and most of all increasingly affordable genetic markers brought about drastic changes to present-day breeding methods. In this chapter, we focus on four significant genetic marker-dependent approaches with significant potential to directly or indirectly change contemporary tree breeding methods. These include pedigree reconstruction, pedigree-free models, association genetics, and genomic selection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest Sciences, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Yousry A. El-Kassaby

  2. Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Campus Box 8002, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA

    Fikret Isik & Ross W. Whetten

Authors
  1. Yousry A. El-Kassaby
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  2. Fikret Isik
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  3. Ross W. Whetten
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Correspondence to Yousry A. El-Kassaby .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Forest Research, Northern Research Station, UK Forestry Commission, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

    Trevor Fenning

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El-Kassaby, Y.A., Isik, F., Whetten, R.W. (2014). Modern Advances in Tree Breeding. In: Fenning, T. (eds) Challenges and Opportunities for the World's Forests in the 21st Century. Forestry Sciences, vol 81. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7076-8_18

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