Abstract
The 31st Southern Forest Tree Improvement Conference was held 14–16 June 2011 in Biloxi, MS, USA. This marks 60 years of biennial technical conferences supported by the Southern Forest Tree Improvement Committee. The theme of the conference was tree improvement opportunities and challenges in the economy emerging around cellulosic biomass, bioproducts, and biofuels. Invited speakers from the industry, academia, and government challenged scientists and students to employ robust technologies for developing and deploying improved trees for the emerging biomass markets as well as for the existing forest products markets. Opportunities for integrating genomics into breeding and selection programs and somatic embryogenesis into deployment practices look promising for loblolly pine (Pinus taeda); the main industrial forest tree in the southeastern USA. Advances in enabling technologies such as DNA sequencing and genotyping open new opportunities for accelerating and achieving tree improvement in all forest tree species. Of the 109 attendees, 47 were first time conference participants and 27 were students, an encouraging sign for the future of forest genetics and tree improvement.
Acknowledgments
We thank our scientific program committee members (Paul Belonger, Amy Brunner, Tom Byram, Barbara Crane, Matias Kirst, Greg Powell, Scott Schlarbaum, and Brian Stanton), session moderators (John Adams, Paul Belonger Amy Brunner, Richard Bryant, Tom Byram, John Davis, Steve McKeand, Greg Powell, and Scott Schlarbaum), and award-judging panels for their dedicated service and our conference organizing consultant Dixie Cartright for her hard work and keen sense of humoring us over the past several months. The North American Quantitative Forest Genetics Workshop was organized by Fikret Isik, North Carolina State University. The 31st SFTIC was partially funded by a NIFA-AFRI grant (2011-68005-30404) awarded to C. Yuceer, R. Rousseau, and C.D. Nelson.
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Communicated by R. Sederoff
The authors served as the organizing committee for the 31st Southern Forest Tree Improvement Conference.
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Nelson, C.D., Rousseau, R.J., Adams, J.P. et al. Report on the 31st Southern Forest Tree Improvement Conference (SFTIC). Tree Genetics & Genomes 8, 439–441 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11295-011-0454-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11295-011-0454-7