%0 Research article
%T Growth and wood property traits in narrow crowned Norway spruce (Picea abies f. pendula) clones grown in southern Finland
%A Zubizarreta Gerendiain, Ane
%A Peltola, Heli
%A Pulkkinen, Pertti
%D 2009
%J Silva Fennica
%V 43
%N 3
%R doi:10.14214/sf.194
%U https://silvafennica.fi/article/194
%X We investigated the growth, yield, wood density traits and fibre  properties in 13 narrow crowned Norway spruce (Picea abies f. pendula)  clones grown at a spacing of 2 m x 1.5 m (about 3300 seedlings/ha) in a  field trial established in 1988 in southern Finland on a forest soil.  For comparison, we used 3 normal crowned Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.)  Karst.) genetic entries grown as a mixture in the same trial  representing southern Finnish breeding regions. We found that wood  density traits and fibre properties showed, on average, lower phenotypic  variation than growth and yield traits regardless of crown type. Narrow  crowned clones also had, on average, lower stem volume and fibre  length, but higher overall wood density. More over, the phenotypic  correlations between studied growth and wood properties ranged, on  average, from moderate (normal crown) to high (narrow crown). These  results were opposite to previous findings for narrow and normal crowned  genetic entries grown in narrower spacing (1 m x 1 m) in southern  Finland. Thus, this indicates lower plasticity of narrow crowned clones  to the increasing growing space compared to normal crowned ones, so,  they should be grown at denser spacing in order to fully utilise its  space efficiency capacity. However, this field trial was established as a  mixture of normal and narrow crown trees, so that 90% of genetic  entries were narrow crowned ones, and therefore the crown competition  would be much higher for normal crowned trees when the whole trial would  consist of that entry alone. In the latter case, we could expect  significantly lower productivity of normal crowned genetic entries with  this spacing.