Rooting and development of cuttings from Pinus chiapensis hedges in response to indolebutyric acid and substrate treatments

Abstract

ABSTRACT Pinus chiapensis is an endemic and endangered species from Mexico and Guatemala, which has low seedling survival from seeds, and protocols for its asexual propagation have not been fully studied. For these reasons, through a greenhouse experiment, we first compared the production and development of cutting capacity from mother plants produced from trees selected at six different locations. Second, we evaluated after 22 weeks of growing the development responses of such cuttings, i.e. survival, root production, root length and cutting length, growing in two substrates supplemented with four different concentrations of indolebutyric acid. We found differences on cutting production and development among the six sites. In particular, plants from Zapotitlán reached the highest yield of 4.28 ± 0.36 cuttings per plant and 1.94 ± 0.08 cm in length. Cutting survival ranged from 68.6% to 100% on all treatments. The highest percentage of rooted cuttings (100%) was observed for substrate B at 1000 ppm of indolebutyric acid. In addition, the highest root production of 3.19 ± 0.21 per cutting, the highest root growth of 4.49 ± 0.79 cm and the highest cutting growth of 5.53 ± 0.26 cm were observed for substrate B at 1000 ppm of indolebutyric acid. The production of rooted cuttings should be utilized in conjunction with genetic tree improvement programs to implement local commercial plantations of plus-trees, which can reduce the extractive pressure of the few remaining relictual populations of this species, which in turn would allow increase the income of rural communities improving their life conditions.