Increasing Norway Spruce Fecundity for Breeding Program

We started drone survey of flowering traits (number of cones on mature trees) in 2019. However, we could not match trees from drone films to ground positions which created an significant issues to identify the pedigree of trees in the films. Therefore, our flowering survey using drone was not successful at current stage. This technology of drone scanning for large trees in mature trials with overlapping tree crowns is not ready for flowering survey at current stage. An improved method with accurate ground control and marking, and minimum crown overlapping to accurately match trees is needed in future survey.

We surveyed fecundity traits of Norway spruce represented by female and male cones, and observed high narrow-sense and broad-sense heritability, indicating both high additive and non-additive genetic variation. High genetic variation and heritability in cone number demonstrate selective breeding or clonal selection will be effective in increasing Norway spruce fecundity. The surveyed flowering information will be jointly studied with whole genome re-sequencing data in the second stage of the long-term project.