Current Advances in Seed Orchard Layouts: Two Case Studies in Conifers

Currently, there has been an increasing demand on seed orchard designs with respect to mitigating inbreeding in advanced generations or facing severe mortality at sites. Optimum Neighborhood Algorithm design (ONA) excels in solving these issues, as shown in two case studies. The first demonstrates the application of the ONA for populating empty positions in an existing orchard. Following this concept, the ONA can be used for upgrading existing orchards, where only high-value parents are retained and new parents are introduced, thus avoiding the genetic penalty associated with the establishment of new-generation seed orchards. The second illustrates benefits of combining the ONA with the Minimum Inbreeding (MI) seed orchard design. Utilizing the MI, distances among clonal rows of selected clones were maximized on the orchard grid while the remaining single-tree positions were populated by ONA.