Provenance Selection for Pulpwood of Masson’s Pine

The samples of 9 provenances were collected from 9-year-old test stands of Masson's Pine located on 3 plantations representative of the northern,central and southern subtropical zones to analyse wood traits including timber structure,physical properties and chemical components.The results are as follows:(1) The variance analyses among and within plantations show that differences between provenances outweighted those between individuals within provenances,and there were significant inter ractions between provenances and plantations.(2) Main economic traits,such as fibre width,the rate of fibre length to width,dipwall thickness,lumen diameter and their rate etc.,were controlled by strong heredity effects,since these traits' hereditary values were all over 0.6.(3) Correlative analyses between wood properties and growth traits suggested that positive selection of growth traits in fast-growing regions tended to decrease the rate of summerwood,rate of fibre length to width,and rate of dipwall thickness to lumen diameter,or increase fibre width and lumen diameter,which provided evidences for indirect selection of timber prop-erties.(4) After selection by 11 traits in close relation to pulp characters,some fine provenances as Gaozhou,Ningming,Ji-an and Dejiang were selected for representative regions.