The canopy coverage is correlated with the number of shoots produced by Eucalyptus clones in a clonal mini-garden.

Saudade de Aguiar, Natália; Navroski, Marcio Carlos; Miranda, Letícia; Sehnen Mota, Clenilso; Estopa, Regiane Abjaud; Nicoletti, Marcos Felipe; Konzen, Enéas Ricardo

In this work, we analyzed the correlation between the canopy coverage of two commercial clones of Eucalyptus benthamii Maiden & Cambage and one of Eucalyptus dunnii Maiden and their shoot yields in a clonal mini-garden system. By canopy coverage, we referred to the area of a picture occupied by leaves (green area) when analyzed using computational resources. The mini-garden was set up to yield shoots on a regular time schedule (between 20 and 30 days) to obtain mini-cuttings for clonal propagation. Pictures were taken at approximately 30 cm above the upper leaves from the plots containing mini-stumps of each clone on the day before the collection of mini-cuttings for six consecutive harvests (approximately 6 months). The leaf coverage was obtained using the computational package Easy Leaf Area. Our results indicated a significantly high Pearson correlation coefficient (r = 0744, P < 0.001) between the canopy coverage and the number of shoots produced by each clone. A logistic regression model was adjusted to this dataset, enabling a prediction of the number of shoots based on the canopy coverage. This approach has the potential for assisting forest nurseries in predicting the yield of mini-cuttings while conducting clonal propagation of their genetic materials.

EUCALYPTUS; FOREST nurseries; LOGISTIC regression analysis; PLANT shoots; LEAVES

Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 2018, Vol 48, Issue 11, p1411

0045-5067

Academic Journal

10.1139/cjfr-2018-0197