The expanded Industry/University Cooperative Research center for Advanced Forestry Systems will link four of the top forestry research programs in the US, and will expand the current Center for Tree Genetics to build on the strengths of the research programs to create a multi-university, interdisciplinary I/UCRC that will solve industry-wide problems through multi-faceted approaches. Researchers will approach questions on multiple scales, including the molecular, cellular, individual-tree, stand, and ecosystem.
The research conducted by the center will increase the competitiveness of forest products industries and forest landowners by solving problems on multiple temporal and spatial scales and determining fundamental solutions that transcend traditional species, regional, and disciplinary boundaries.
There are 215 million acres of forestland in the southern United States including 32 million acres of pine plantations. These forests are vital to the ecological, social, and economic health of the U.S. Forests provide clean water and oxygen, sequester substantial amounts of carbon, contribute to biodiversity and wildlife habitat, and provide spiritual and recreational opportunities for an increasingly urban population. Wood is a major economic commodity serving as the rwa material for lumber, panels, pulp and paper, and increasingly as a feedstock for bioenergy and biofuels. Mantaining a viable wood based industry that is the economic backbone of the South while balancig the competing non-commodity demands placed on the forests is a fundamental issue facing society in the 21st century. Varietal forestry has been propopsed as on way to significantly increase productivty of plantation forestry. Significant gains in tree growth, wood properties, insect and disease resistance can be achieved through these advanced methods of genetic improvment. Clonal forestry uses vegetative propagation to mass produce identical copies of selected individual trees with wood properties optimized to rpodice pulp, sawtimber of biomass. This research project has established field trials of clonal loblolly pine in Virginia, North Carolina and Brazil. At each site we are evaluating 6 different clones that are managed under two different levels of forest management. The trees are planted at three spacing designed to optimize production of biomass, pulpwood or sawtimber. The results to date indicate that there are large differences in growth among the clones, silvicultural treatmetns and locations. However, the differences are not due to differences in the rate of photosynthesis, which are almost the same in all the clones, treatments and locations. The differences in growth are more closely related to the amount of available nitrogen in the soil that enables the trees to produce large canopies and this grow faster.
