Wood and Pulping Properties Variation of Acacia crassicarpa A.Cunn. ex Benth. and Sampling Strategies for Accurate Phenotyping

Gustavo Salgado Martins,Sabki Sabki,Muhammad Yuliarto,Juan Jose Acosta,Agung Prasetyo,Shawn D Mansfield,Faride Unda,Gary R Hodge,Rudine Antes

doi:10.3390/f11101043

Gustavo Salgado Martins, Sabki Sabki + Show 7 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/f11101043

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Abstract

Research Highlights: This study provides a comprehensive set of wood and pulping properties of Acacia crassicarpa A.Cunn. ex Benth. to assess variation and efficient sampling strategies for whole-tree level phenotyping. Background and Objectives: A. crassicarpa is an important tree species in Southeast Asia, with limited knowledge about its wood properties. The objective of this study was to characterize important wood properties and pulping performance of improved germplasm of the species. Furthermore, we investigated within-tree patterns of variation and evaluated the efficiency of phenotyping strategies. Materials and Methods: Second-generation progeny trials were studied, where forty 50-month-old trees were selected for destructive sampling and assessed for wood density, kraft pulp yield, α-cellulose, carbohydrate composition, and lignin content and composition (S/G ratio). We estimated the phenotypic correlations among traits determined within-tree longitudinal variation and its importance for whole-tree level phenotyping. Results: The mean whole-tree disc basic density was 481 kg/m3, and the screened kraft pulp yield was 53.8%. The reliabilities of each sampling position to predict whole-tree properties varied with different traits. For basic density, pulp yield, and glucose content, the ground-level sampling could reliably predict the whole-tree property. With near infrared reflectance spectroscopy predictions as an indirect measurement method for disc basic density, we verified reduced reliability values for breast height sampling but sufficiently correlated to allow accurate ranking and efficient selection of genotypes in a breeding program context. Conclusions: We demonstrated the quality of A. crassicarpa as a wood source for the pulping industry. The wood and pulping traits have high levels of phenotypic variation, and standing tree sampling strategies can be performed for both ranking and high-accuracy phenotyping purposes.

Highlights

Acacia crassicarpa A.Cunn. ex Benth. is a fast-growing tree species largely used as a wood source in Southeast Asia [1] where planted forests are supported by advancements in silviculture [2], genetic improvement by recurrent selection strategies, vegetative propagation, and, recently, use of molecular tools [3,4,5]
We destructively sampled 40 trees at multiple positions to assess the longitudinal patterns of variation in traits and to determine whole-tree property estimates
For basic density and insoluble lignin, the Slope100 varied only with negative values, indicating that, at the population mean and for all individual trees, there is a decreasing trend from the base to the top of the bole for these traits. This result is consistent with the longitudinal variation pattern for basic density reported for A. mangium [24] and contrary to Eucalyptus nitens [66], which showed an increasing longitudinal pattern for basic density

Summary

Introduction

Acacia crassicarpa A.Cunn. ex Benth. is a fast-growing tree species largely used as a wood source in Southeast Asia [1] where planted forests are supported by advancements in silviculture [2], genetic improvement by recurrent selection strategies, vegetative propagation, and, recently, use of molecular tools [3,4,5]. The primary use of the species’ wood is for pulp and paper production, where large vertically. Forests 2020, 11, 1043 integrated companies in the region have hundreds of thousands of hectares of A. crassicarpa forests comprising a major component of their wood supply chain [6,7]. Targeting higher pulp production efficiency, one of the main breeding objectives is to improve the wood quality to optimize cellulose yield and chemical consumption during the pulping process. Wood chemistry must be considered when evaluating pulping processes and product quality [12]. To realize genetic gains in wood quality traits, understanding the extent of genetic control is fundamental to the choice of the breeding strategy(ies) to be implemented [13,14]

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