Planting for the Future: Why Purdue HTIRC Elite Selection Trees Belong in Your Woodland Reforestation Project

When planning a new forest or woodland planting, the choice of seedlings is one of the
single most critical factors determining the long-term success, value, and resilience of your
investment. While readily available seedlings from state nurseries are a good start, the timber quality of such seedlings is largely unknown and unproven. In many cases, bed-run seedlings have limited genetic diversity and come from stands with poor timber characteristics and limited suitability to your site and soil conditions.

This is where the Purdue HTIRC (Hardwood Tree Improvement and Regeneration
Center), Elite Select Trees (EST’s), come into play. These trees have been selected for above
average growth and timber quality over decades of rigorous replicated test plantings across Indiana and other states in the Central Hardwood Region of the U.S. Recently, Purdue’s improvement program has thinned out (culled) average and below average trees to facilitate cross pollination of their elite selections, allowing us to now deliver this research to the public.

In addition, much of the seed Purdue provides us is derived from grafted seed orchards which further improves the genetic quality of the seedlings by ensuring that elite seed trees are pollinated by other elite clones in the orchard. Thus, you will have confidence that Purdue EST’s are proven to deliver good growth and timber production to benefit your planting.

The most compelling reason to incorporate Purdue HTIRC Elite Selection Trees is the
significant uplift in quality they offer for your entire stand. Bed-run seedlings are mass-
produced with a focus on seedling production and not on superior and proven timber
characteristics. The result is often slow growth, poor stem straightness, excessive branching, and heightened susceptibility to pests.

In contrast, HTIRC Elite Select Timber trees have been tested to have:

• Faster Growth Rates: Leading to quicker canopy closure which reduces weed control and shorter rotation times for quicker returns on investments.
• Excellent Timber Form: Featuring straight, clean boles (trunks) with minimal taper and fewer lower branches which significantly increases the volume of high-value clear wood, commanding a premium price at harvest.
• Increased Genetic Diversity: Purdue researchers have focused on maximizing genetic diversity by including from 30 to 60 elite parent trees in each species mix. This helps to ensure good outcrossing and variation for adaptability to a wider variety of planting sites and future circumstances.
• Disease Resistance Specific clones, such as Purdue Select Butternut, are selected for disease resistance and all of their species have proven tolerance against common pests and pathogens.
• Improved Seed Quality: As your trees mature and begin to reproduce, the EST’s will cross-pollinate with remaining generic trees and your local trees to aid natural regeneration in your planting and adjacent woodlots naturally improving the genetic quality of future seedlings on your land.
• Adaptability: A wider gene pool ensures that some individuals will possess the necessary traits to thrive on a broader set of soil types and sites as well as withstand future, unforeseen challenges, whether they be climate changes, new pests and diseases, or invasive plants.

Implementation Strategy: Mixing EST’s with Bed-Run and Trainer Trees

Timber plantings begin with a large number of trees so that the tree canopy closes in to shade out weeds and understory plants along with forcing the trees to grow tall and to shade out lower branches quickly to improve log quality. Ultimately, however, only 100 trees per acre will ever grow large enough to become to become profitable timber trees. The most economical way to incorporate select genetics into a tree planting is to space them out and spread them in a systematic fashion from as much as 50% (every other row or every other tree down your rows) to 25%, or even as low as 10% since these will most likely become your crop trees and you can thin out the inferior bed-run and other trainer trees you started out with. Today, with select genetics, improved nursery production, and improved tree protection methods, we see a future of wider spaced plantings intelligently designed to reduce the burden of thinning and to more productive and profitable new forests.

Here is a helpful link from the US Forest Service: https://www.nrs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr-p-115papers/07mckenna-p-115.pdf