by Jo Clark, Head of Research at Future Trees Trust

Jo Clark explains some differences between a provenance and a progeny trial.

A provenance trial includes trees from many different origins.  The seed for each provenance is collected from a stand (e.g. Friston) and bulked at source.  The provenance trial then compares the performance of all the trees from a single provenance. This tells us where we should be looking to source our trees from for optimal performance for a given location. However, it doesn’t tell us anything about the performance of an individual tree.

In a progeny trial, seed is collected from a single tree which displays the traits you are interested in e.g. excellent form and vigour in our case.  We know the Mother trees because we have collected the seed from that tree, but you do not know the pollen Father, so the seed form a half sibling family (or progeny).  The progeny are then tested as single trees across a number of sites so that Future Trees Trust can evaluate the performance of each parent tree through assessing its progeny. This is called the genotype x environment interaction and yields the most information for breeding purposes.