Over the past 30 years industrial plantation forests have become a major supplier of industrial wood. The reasons for this change are several and include the improved economics of planted forests due to technological innovations, the increases in natural forest wood costs due to increasing inaccessibility and rising wood costs from natural forests due to various pressures from environmentalists to reduce harvesting in old-growth forests. Forestry today is on the threshold of the widespread introduction of biotechnology into its operational practices in the form of sophisticated tissue cultures, which produce clonal seedlings, and through the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which produce desired tree and wood traits. As more of the world’s industrial wood is being produced on planted forests, the potential to introduce genetic alterations into the germ plasm utilized in planting is obvious. In many cases the biotechnology likely to be introduced in forestry is simply an extension of that being utilized in agriculture, e.g., herbicide-tolerant genes. However, biotechnology in forestry is also developing applications unique to forestry, e.g., genes for fiber modification, lignin reduction and extraction, and to promote straight stems and reduced branching. This paper discusses the growing role of plantation forests and the potential impacts of biotechnology on forestry. Traditional breeding and some aspects of biotechnology are discussed briefly and some of the various types of biotechnological innovations in progress in forestry and that may be forthcoming over the next decade or two are identified. A quantitative estimate is made of the potential economic impact of one transgenic application—that of the herbicide-resistant gene in forestry—and some of the potential environmental benefits associated with various types of biotechnology innovations are discussed.
[1]
T. Hoban,et al.
Seeds and Sovereignty: The Use and Control of Plant Genetic Resources.
,
1989
.
[2]
Roger A. Sedjo.
The potential of high-yield plantation forestry for meeting timber needs
,
1999
.
[3]
Chung-Jui Tsai,et al.
Repression of lignin biosynthesis promotes cellulose accumulation and growth in transgenic trees
,
1999,
Nature Biotechnology.
[4]
H. Blackbourn.
Less lignin is more cellulose
,
1999
.
[5]
T. J. Mullin,et al.
Environmental release of transgenic trees in Canada — potential benefits and assessment of biosafety
,
1998
.
[6]
Alberto Goetzl,et al.
Sustainability of temperate forests
,
1998
.
[7]
Roger A. Sedjo,et al.
Using Foret Plantations TO SPARE Natural Forests
,
1997
.
[8]
R. Sedjo.
Property Rights, Genetic Resources, and Biotechnological Change
,
1992,
The Journal of Law and Economics.
[9]
Agricultural Biotech Faces Backlash in Europe
,
1998,
Science.
[10]
Robert Mendelsohn,et al.
Forest Management, Conservation, and Global Timber Markets
,
1999
.
[11]
Y. Hayami,et al.
Agricultural Development: An International Perspective.
,
1972
.
[12]
P. Charest,et al.
The regulation of transgenic trees in North America.
,
2000
.
[13]
J. Cairney,et al.
Clonal forestry genetic engineering : Where we stand, future prospects, and potential impacts on mill operations
,
1998
.
[14]
David E. Hibbs,et al.
PoPlar ChiP ProduCtion for Willamette Valley Grass seed sites
,
1995
.