GENETIC QUALITY ESTIMATION OF FIRST-GENERATION SEED ORCHARDS OF CHINESE-FIR

A series of trials using bulked seeds, routinely collected from the 50 seed orchards and three kinds of commercial seedlots as controls ck1, ck2, ck3, were established at four locations in the northern part of range of Chinese-fir. The main objectives are: to identify outstanding seed orchards for plantation in that region, where the trial located; to test the effectiveness of the phenotypic plus-tree selection and also to provide information prerequisite to future management procedures of seed orchards. The early results showed that while the young trees derived from about 1/2 of the seed orchards studies grew faster than their controls which had collected from the county where the seed orchard located, the progenies of almost all seed orchards were inferior to those of the best provenance in juvenile growth. Therefore, these results also suggested that phenotypic selection without progeny test was not so effective as provenance selection. The superiority of seed orchards should be regarded cautiously as certainty and in most cases may not necessarily be better than the use of seeds of the best provenance. Roguing of first-generation seed orchards should be a critical task in future.