Newsletter of the High-Value Wood Resources
research programme of the CRC for Forestry
ISSUE TWO: SEPTEMBER 2006
The CRC for Forestry Annual Research Meeting was
held in July at the University of Melbourne Creswick campus, and
provided a great opportunity for Programme Two participants to
meet, many for the first time. Those who attended received a good
over-view of our first year of operation. CRC members can view a
summary slide presentation of the first year's progress, and
minutes of the Programme and Project committee meetings, on the
members' website (members only).
It has taken some time for us all to "learn the ropes" of the CRC
finance and reporting systems and I am confident that we are now
making strong scientific progress with our research projects.
Industry partners are providing excellent in-kind support for the
major experiments that are already underway. A review of our
milestones during the Annual Research Meeting indicated that we are
on or ahead of track for almost all milestones.
We are currently finalising contract details to welcome two new
participants in Programme Two, the Queensland Government of
Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, and Midway; plus
additional investment from Integrated Tree Cropping, Great Southern
Plantations and Forest Enterprises Australia (link to the websites
of each of these organisations - see partners for
links).
This has enabled us to set up a fifth research
project, "High-Value Wood Products from Subtropical Plantations"
(link to High-Value Wood Products from
Subtropical Plantations below)
During the annual meeting, our external science
reviewer, Dr Steve Verryn of South
Africa's CSIR, provided a valuable international perspective on
our programme's objectives and methods. We have set ourselves a big
challenge in trying to integrate genetic improvement, silviculture,
processing and sampling systems that describe stand value, and
develop decision support systems that will really help growers
maximise profitability and make solid-wood plantations a sound
investment.
As noted by Steve, it is essential for us to keep
in close contact with other research groups worldwide who are also
integrating multidisciplinary research programmes to achieve
higher-value plantations. Drs Peter Volker and Tom Baker, who are
co-leaders of Project 2.2, will be visiting several eucalypt
growing companies in Chile in October. They will inspect
established clonal plantations of Eucalyptus globulus. We
are hoping that collaboration with the Chilean companies will
provide some hard data on whether "going clonal" results in greater
stand uniformity and therefore lowers harvesting costs. There are
strong cross-programme links to
CRC Research Programme Three (members only), and RP3's newly
recruited Chilean scientist Mauricio Acuna has been facilitating
their visit. Look out for Peter and Tom's report in our next
newsletter!
Steve also reminded us that one of the measures of
improvement in plantation value will be environmental benefit -
reduced wastage and lower environmental impact in resource
processing.
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What's on
The First Australasian Forest Genetics
Conference will be held in Hobart, 11-14April 2007. CRC for
Forestry research will be reported at this meeting and it will be a
great opportunity for researchers and students to catch up on the
latest research and breeding programmes for eucalypts and pines.
Thanks to the Forests and Wood Products Research and Development
Corporation, Ensis, the Southern Tree Breeding Association and
Forests NSW who are all supporting this important meeting.
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Project 2.2 Silviculture for High-Value
Solid and Engineered Wood Products
A silvicultural trial is being established by
University of Melbourne researchers in a three-year-old
Eucalyptus nitens plantation near Carrajung in West
Gippsland, Victoria. This plantation was established by Hancocks
Victoria Plantations and will be used to examine the interactions
between thinning, pruning and fertiliser on growth by measuring
canopy development and physiology.
The trial consists of a factorial design with three
factors:
During the last few weeks the plots have been set
up and crop trees have been selected Weeds have been slashed and
plots are now being pruned, thinned and fertilised.
Five trees have been sampled to examine canopy
architecture, and above-ground biomass and its partitioning to
leaves and wood. Canopy physiology has also been investigated in
the upper, middle and lower thirds of the canopies of trees in the
control plots. Future work will involve quarterly physiological
measurements, half-yearly measurements of branch development in the
lower six metres of the stems and annual measurements of tree
growth responses, biomass partitioning and canopy architecture.
University of Melbourne researcher David Forrester measuring
the gas exchange of a leaf from the upper canopy
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Project 2.4 Incorporating Wood Quality into
Plantation Estate Management
Progress with near infra red analysis -
from Geoff Downes
Near infra red (NIR) analysis offers a low-cost
tool for predicting wood chemical and physical properties.
One of the goals of Project 2.4 is to see NIR
prediction taken up by CRC for Forestry members and applied
routinely to:
We have been consolidating cellulose and kraft pulp
yield (KPY) data to see whether we can develop a single multi-site,
multi-species NIR prediction model. Most NIR studies to date have
predicted KPY or cellulose for a single species at a single site.
This approach has reduced the commercial application of NIR for
predicting wood properties, as the calibration demands are too
costly if they have to be done separately for each site and
species. Combined with an understandable discomfort with the
multivariate statistical approach required by NIR, this has made
potential users wary.
We decided that one of the most important industry
needs was to test whether a single calibration could be applied
across sites and/or species. The graph below illustrates one of
several encouraging results. Using over 200 samples of
Eucalyptus globulus and E. nitens collected by
previous CRCs, a multi-site calibration for cellulose prediction
was developed by University of Tasmania technical officer Linda
Ballard.
The graph below shows how this calibration
performed when applied to an independent set of 30 E.
globulus samples from a new site - the Gunns Ltd progeny trial
at Shale Oil, north-west Tasmania, which is being studied in
Project 2.1. You can see that the NIR predictions agree well with
the cellulose values of these 30 samples obtained by chemical
analysis.
Similar results have been obtained for kraft pulp
yield. Over the next few months we intend to build larger models
across more species and sites, and test these to determine an
optimal number of samples required in a calibration to give robust
predictions.
Some researchers and most of the industry partners in Project 2.4
have also been separately involved in a FWPRDCfunded project which has
assessed KPY prediction for E. globulus in the field using
a portable NIR instrument on standing trees. The encouraging
results of this project have been reported to the FWPRDC and
discussions are now underway to determine how the CRC for Forestry
can further develop this research.
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Project 2.5 High-Value Wood Products from
Subtropical Plantations
This new project will be led by Kevin Harding of
the Queensland Government
of Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries. It has taken
some time to set it up so that it will complement, but not
duplicate, genetic, silvicultural and processing research on
subtropical eucalypt plantations being carried out through two
ACIAR
projects, research already scheduled in CRCF Projects 2.2, 2.3 and
2.4, and the research programmes being run by Queensland
Government of Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries
and Forests NSW.
Our strategy is to implement additional silvicultural research
through Project 2.2, Silviculture for High Value Wood Products,
over the next three years, then run a separate Project 2.5 in the
last three years of the CRC's operation, when processing studies
will be able to access the silvicultural experiments that have been
set up. The value of the pruning and thinning trials established by
Forestry Tasmania
in Eucalyptus nitens plantations in the 1980s is now clear
as CRCF scientists study the experimental trees and their wood
products.
Now we have the chance to leave a strong legacy of high-quality
experimental field trials of the target subtropical eucalypts so
that in later years, extending beyond the life-span of CRCF, we can
get hard answers about how best to manage subtropical plantations
and process their wood products.
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Welcome to new students
We welcome Mr Saravanan
Thavamanikumar, a PhD student who commenced work in August 2006 on
an association genetics study in Project 2.1. This project will
improve pulpwood quality of Eucalyptus globulus through
molecular breeding. Saravanan has joined
Luke McManus and
Gerd Bossinger at Melbourne University's Creswick campus. Luke
and Saravanan collected DNA samples from over 800 trees in the
Gunns Ltd
E. globulus progeny trial at Shale Oil, near Latrobe in
north-west Tasmania. They worked with University of Tasmania PhD student
Des Stackpole, who now knows the trial like the back of his hand,
after sampling over
2200 trees for wood properties (members only).
We are currently in discussion with several student candidates for
positions in Projects 2.1 and 2.3. Remember to keep your eyes
peeled for suitable candidates for the vacant
postgraduate student positions (members only) in our
projects.
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