Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In Sweden, collaboration between Sval¨f Weibull and SLU has resulted in a
collection dominated by northern European and Siberian willows. It is used for
commercial breeding by Sval
¨
f Weibull and for underpinning science by SLU. In
the Northeastern United States, the willow breeding program at State University of
New York (SUNY) had 730 accessions in a germplasm collection as of 2005
[
10
]. The collection was dominated by native
S. eriocephela
,
S. discolor
, and
S. bebbiana
. It also included naturalized imports from Europe such as
S. viminalis
and
S. purpurea
and imports from Asia. Much of the collection
originated from the Canadian program of the 1970s and 1980s based in Toronto.
The collection was used to breed for bioenergy and phytoremediation as well as
other environmental projects. The breeding work moved to Cornell University in
2009, but work on the application of willows to environmental problems continues
at SUNY.
Major Breeding Achievements
Karp et al. [
11
] presented a graph of willow yield increases based upon the year of
first appearance of improved genotypes in yield trials (Fig.
4.1
). The early geno-
types were little more than landraces, selected from the wild, but during the 1980s
improved cultivars began to appear. The data indicates a rate of increase in yield of
100 kg ha
1
year
1
resulting from selection and breeding. This represents an
impressive rate of gain when compared to other temperate crops; however, it
must be remembered that willow is a new crop that has been subjected to little
Fig. 4.1 Changes in yield over time, based upon the date of appearance in trials
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