EVOLTREE Annual Meeting 2014

Review of the Meeting

A review of the meeting can be found here.

Organisation

The annual meeting of the EVOLTREE network 2014 was held as a part of the IUFRO Forest Tree Breeding Conference in Prague. The IUFRO conference was held from 25th to 29th August with a varied scientific programme on topics such as advances in breeding theory, genetic evaluation protocols, progeny testing, and interaction between forest tree breeding and other disciplines. EVOLTREE has a full-day slot comprising a morning scientific session, and an afternoon administrative session (Governing Board meeting and internal business).

Scientific Session

In the morning EVOLTREE held the session "Evolutionary Aspects and Adaptation and Breeding", chaired by Giovanni Vendramin (director of the EVOLTREE partner organisation the Institute of Plant Genetics in Florence, Italy). The session started with two keynote lectures: the first by Dr Martin Lascaux (University of Uppsala) on the clinal variation and genetic basis of adaptive traits in trees, and the second by Dr René Smulders (Wageningen UR) on community genetics of poplar as a keystone species for insect and fungal species.

The morning session was followed by the launching of the new EVOLTREE open source project "TreeType", which aimed to collect data on some simple phenotypic traits for European trees (chaired by Dr Stephen Cavers, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology). Afterwards Dr Patricia Faivre (INRA) talked about the collaborative work carried out EVOLTREE partners on new genomic tools to enhance the discovery of functional diversity in natural populations of Populus nigra L. Dr Witold Wachowiak (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology) then looked at the divergence and selection on evolutionary and ecological timescales in closely related pine species. Santiago González Martinez (INIA) ended the session with his presentation on molecular signatures of climate adaptation and range expansions in Mediterranean conifers.

The scientific session was open to all participants of the IUFRO conference, as well as EVOLTREE members.

More information about the EVOLTREE scientific session can be found on the IUFRO Forest Tree Breeding Conference scientific programme web page: http://www.iufrobreeding2014.org/scientific-programme

Pictures of the session can be found here.

Governing Board Meeting

This meeting was reserved for Governing Board members only. For more information, please contact Stephanie Hayes (stephanie.hayes@efi.int)