会议名称(英文): Sixth International Poplar Symposium (IPS-VI)
所属学科: 作物学及林木育种、生物学,经济林及园林学
开始日期: 2014-07-20
结束日期: 2014-07-28
所在国家: 加拿大
所在城市: 加拿大
具体地点: Vancouver, British Columbia (B.c.), Canada
主办单位: 国际林联
E-MAIL: silviconsult@telus.net
会议网站: http://www.2014ipsvi.com/
会议背景介绍:
Thirteen years ago Bradshaw and Strauss[1] ventured “the forecast that the 21st Century will be remembered by the forest products industry as the Era of Tree Domestication, and that poplar will lead the way”. They drew a parallel with developments in agriculture and proposed that poplar culture has reached “a fork in the road” where one branch leads to a continuation of poplar as a forest tree, while the other leads to poplar as a domesticated crop. The adoption of cultural practices, such as intensive weed control, fertilization and in some cases irrigation, as currently in use in poplar farming, was regarded as the beginning of “the most fundamental process in crop development: domestication”.
Intensive cultural practices remove a substantial amount of the competitive restrictions inherent in growing poplars as forest trees. The authors stated that the “environment of a cultivated crop is simplified and optimized by the farmer to allow the domesticated plant to devote its energy almost exclusively to the production of useful structures, such as seeds, tubers, or fruits”. For domesticated poplars and willows those ‘useful structures’ consist of wood fibre.
Intensive cultural practices alone are no guarantee for success. To accelerate the process of domestication, we must combine the use of genetics and genomics research, improved cultural and integrated pest management practices with appropriate regulatory and public policies. While this is ongoing, conservation of the natural Populus and Salix gene pools needs to be ensured, if only to provide useful genes for future breeding purposes, so we cannot ignore the other branch in the road. Only then can we ensure the sustainability of domesticated poplar and willow as agricultural production systems.
There has been a lot progress since 2001 and it is time to take ‘stock’. How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?
This meeting strives to address these issues and therefore invites researchers, practitioners, regulatory and policy experts to help define what the challenges are and where we are going.