MATING DESIGN: PROGENY DEVELOPMENT AND ITS EVALUATION

摘要

Forest tree breeding is aimed at maximizing the economic potential of any tree species found suitable for afforestation programmes. It involves a number of activity ranging from simple provenance selection to the complex processes of making controlledcrosses and estimating genetic variances. Many studies have revealed the existence of large intraspecific variation for many economically important tree characteristics. Hence provenance (seed origin) selection is a very important step in the genetic improvement of such tree species. Thus after selection of a few individual trees from a base population, large populations of trees are produced by crossing among the selected trees using an appropriate mating design.