Forestry

The global exploitation of petroleum reserves has enabled modern industrialization, but the depletion of hydrocarbon reserves presents a significant limitation to current raw material and energy supply. The Canadian Government has established a Renewable Fuels Strategy, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by mandating an average 5% renewable fuel content in gasoline for …

POPCAN: Genetic improvement of poplar trees as a Canadian bioenergy feedstock Read More »

Climates are changing more rapidly than forests can adapt on their own. However, the tremendous genetic variation within widespread native tree species can be used to pre-adapt the hundreds of millions of trees planted each year in western Canada to climate change. Natural populations are locally adapted to temperature and moisture regimes, and they differ …

AdaptTree: Assessing the adaptive portfolio of reforestation stocks for future climates Read More »

Bioinformatics straddles the disciplines of computer science, computational biology, genomics, and molecular biology. Thus, bioinformaticians require a relatively hard to find set of skills to effectively carry out the bioinformatics analyses. Over the past eight years, the TRIA Mountain Pine Beetle project has generated substantial genomic resources and genomic datasets. This project will conduct value-added …

Support for a bioinformatics position for the NSERC TRIA Network Read More »

The SMarTForest project will develop tools to enhance forest health and productivity and to increase the value recovered from forest plantations. This project will leverage the power of genomics to develop diagnostic markers based on DNA, metabolites, and proteins to advance breeding in Canada’s major spruce species. Marker systems are aimed at identifying trees and …

SMarTForest: Spruce marker technologies for sustainable forestry Read More »

Energy derived from renewable biological materials (i.e. bioenergy) offers a realistic means of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. This project addresses an issue central to the sustainable production of bioenergy from renewable lignocellulose feedstock under conditions of changing environments. The proposed work seeks to remedy the current lack of accurate tools for reliable prediction …

Genomics-enhanced forecasting of lignocellulosic feedstock supply for bioenergy Read More »

The Alberta 1000 plants (1KP) project is a public-private partnership that is collecting gene sequence information for 1000 different species of plants, with an emphasis on plants indigenous to Alberta or that could be cultivated or processed in Alberta. In each case, the team will target plants that produce interesting and useful bioproducts. In Phase …

Alberta 1,000 plants initiative Read More »

During this current outbreak, mountain pine beetle (MPB) has killed pines across more than 15 million hectares in British Columbia and Alberta. MPB is poised to continue its relentless spread through the jack pine of Canada’s boreal forests. This team will investigate how MPB and pine genetic variation influences MPB spread – focusing on the …

Translating Mountain Pine Beetle genomics outputs into tools for forest protection and resiliency Read More »

The current mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic in British Columbia is the largest bark beetle outbreak in recorded history. Despite the epidemic dimensions of the current MPB outbreak, very little is known about the molecular mechanisms and the population genomics of the interacting bark beetles, fungi, and trees. The proposed project will deliver advanced knowledge …

Mountain pine beetle epidemic Read More »

Spruce trees are the most widely used species in Canada’s forest plantations thus understanding its genomics is critical to improving tree growth and yield as well as wood properties, at the molecular level. Arborea II will create an inventory of the natural variability and expression of thousands of spruce genes. By identifying specific genes associated …

Arborea II – genomics for molecular breeding in softwood trees Read More »