Oregon’s seed orchard breeds resilient forests

Douglas firs, hemlocks and ponderosa pines are fundamental parts of Oregon’s natural forests. In fact, there are people working across the state to breed better versions of those trees to be more resistant to insects, diseases and climate change. Don Kaczmarek, a forest geneticist for the Oregon Department of Forestry, joins us to talk about his work breeding trees, and producing seeds for the state’s forests and seed banks.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. 50 years ago, the Oregon Department of Forestry bought a 400-acre site near St. Paul that was initially going to be a state prison. Instead, the agency turned it into a sprawling series of orchards. It’s now called the J.E. Schroeder Seed Orchard. As the name suggests, unlike most orchards you might have heard of – full of hazelnuts, or cherries, or apples, or pears – this one makes seeds. The agency says it has harvested 28,000 pounds of Douglas fir seeds over the last 20 years alone. These seeds are used to reforest millions of acres in Oregon and Washington, even in California.

It’s Don Kaczmarek’s job to figure out which seeds are best-suited to withstand the changing climatic pest and disease threats of the future. He is a forest geneticist for the Oregon Department of Forestry, and he joins us now. Don, welcome to the show.

Don Kaczmarek: Thank you. Thank you for having me here. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of this seed bank operation?

Kaczmarek: Well, the seed orchard complex, as you mentioned, it covers about 400 acres of land. We have active orchards that cover about 130 acres of land of that of 440 acres or so. We work with a range of species in the orchards; we have Douglas fir, western hemlock, western red cedar, western larch and ponderosa pine orchards.

So the way the orchard functions is we have different cooperators who have land holdings throughout Oregon and Washington. And then based on what their seed needs to reforest their lands, they establish seed orchards to produce the seed that they need. And one of the things that people produce seed in the seed orchard context is, it’s just much more predictable and reliable for seed production. Certainly, you can collect wild seed, but that tends to be a very erratic process. Seed production and natural forest stands can vary widely depending on environmental conditions. So you could get a big crop this year and then you might not get a crop for three to five or 10 years again.

What we do in a seed orchard context is we have intensively managed stands of trees where we have really known genetic entities. So the material is selected for given traits that we want to perpetuate in our next stands that we plant. And then we intensively manage those seed orchards to begin producing seed at young ages. And then our seed orchards for most of our species produce high reliable crops on a two-year interval. So it’s just much more predictable, and it’s something that people can count on: that they’ll have the seed they need to essentially forest the land that they have.

Miller: How do you trick – or maybe that’s the wrong word. How do you force a tree to make a bunch of pine cones with a bunch of seeds on your schedule versus its schedule?

Kaczmarek: Well, what one of the things, there’s always an age factor.  So you have to get your trees up to both a critical age and a critical size to begin producing seed. What we do when we establish our trees, we try to have very good cultural conditions. We try to make sure that the water and nutrients that are on the site are really channeled to our orchard trees, not the competing vegetations.

If you look at our orchards, they’ll look very similar to what you would see with a filbert orchard or an apple orchard. It’s trees that are really well-maintained, fairly intensively managed. What we’ll do with those trees is promote rapid early establishment and growth. And then for our Douglas fir, we generally try to produce our first seed crop on those trees at ages six or seven. What we do to get the trees … at the young ages, those trees are really in a highly vegetative state. So, most of their growth is actually put into vegetative growth – so height and diameter growth.

What you have to do is, as you mentioned, kind of trick the tree to shift over into a reproductive state. And what we do is we use a couple of different methods. You can use different combinations of fertilizer, and if you hit those right combinations of fertilizer, that can stimulate more flowering for a young tree. The other thing we’ll tend to do is we’ll tend to do what we call artificial stimulation. And for Douglas fir that usually consists of a partial girdle applied to the trunk of the tree. What that does is, the girdling effect essentially changes the carbohydrate metabolism tree. So more fixed photosynthate from the tree is fixing remains in the crown of the tree. That enhanced carbohydrate metabolism will tend to trigger reproductive growth at the expense of vegetative growth.

The other thing we’ll also do on young Douglas fir trees is we’ll use a synthetic hormone called gibberellic acid, which will essentially be injected into the stem of the trees. And that hormone, with combination of the girdling and the fertilization regimes we use, will pretty quickly trigger the tree to go from a solely vegetative growth stage to a more reproductive phase.

Miller: I just want to make sure we have enough time to squeeze everything in. Those are various ways that get increasingly technical to force them to make seeds when you want to.

Taking the bigger look here, how do you know which trees are going to be best for what seems to so many of us like a very uncertain future for humans – and I imagine for trees as well. You’re planning for the next 10, 20, 50, 70 years. How do you make those decisions?

Kaczmarek: Well, all the work at the seed orchard is really supported by very robust tree improvement programs that are in place for the various species we’re working with. And what we do with that material is the trees that go in our seed orchard are not just random selections. Our western hemlock and our Douglas fir tree breeding programs are in the third cycle. So they’ve been breeding this material for the last 50 to 60 years.

So what we do when we’re breeding, we take selected parents, a selected female parent, and we collect pollen from a selected male tree and make controlled pollination of that material. That seed that is used to produce loads of seedlings that go into our progeny test that will be tested across various landscapes, environmental conditions.

After we do measurements on that material – so we could be looking at growth rates, we could be looking at adaptability, having high survival, we could be looking at disease tolerance. So when we have those selections, literally tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of trees, we evaluate that and then we’ll make the selections of the material that has the best traits that we want to perpetuate in our next generation of material.

Miller: How long might you let one of these potential trees go? How old do they get before you’re ready to say, “OK, we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna actually choose this one to get thousands and thousands of seeds from”?

Kaczmarek: We’ll generally evaluate our progeny test at young, fairly young ages: seven or eight, and then at 10 to 13. And we can make selections fairly quickly at, say, age eight or 10 on that material. And then what we do is we maintain those tests, and we’ll sometimes go back and we’ll remeasure those tests at age 20, or 25, or 30. And then really confirm that the early selections we made are still the material that we wanna see going forward. So it’s kind of a continual process.

One of the keys in a tree improvement game is you wanna move fairly quickly. You can’t really wait 30 or 40 years to make your final selections. So you do have to make some fairly early selections, but then it’s always key to be able to have the test in place to verify those selections if you want to do that.

Miller: What is most exciting about this job for you? We have about two minutes left.

Kaczmarek: Well, I think it certainly combines a lot of different things. You have to have a really good understanding of how trees grow. You have to understand the pseudo-cultural requirements of the various species. And then certainly, you have to have a good understanding of the genetic components that we have in place out there. And then it’s really gratifying to see, this spring, trees are growing, make our crosses. This fall, we’ll harvest those seeds, those cones, extract the seeds from that, and then we could be sowing those trees as early as next spring. So it’s really a rapid process.

We’ve put in orchards over the last seven, eight or 10 years that are now producing significant amounts of seed. So that seed is actually making its way out to the landscape in a fairly short order. It’s a continual process of improvement. We’re trying to continually move forward with things. So I think that’s really gratifying to see that we’re really extending a lot of those benefits to all the the state of Oregon and the state of Washington, if you will.

Miller: Don Kaczmarek, thanks very much.

Kaczmarek: Thank you.

Miller: Don Kaczmarek is a forest geneticist for the Oregon Department of Forestry. He works at the J.E. Schroeder Seed Orchard.

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