ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the likely development of eucalypt plantation forestry and wood utilization over the next 30 years; comments on the extent to which breeding might contribute to the associated challenges to management; and discusses how breeders and genetic researchers might respond in setting their R&D priorities. This time frame is chosen advisedly based on lead times for uptake of molecular breeding technologies on an operational scale and on the rotation period for eucalypt plantation crops. Although eucalypts are among the fastest growing industrial trees, the generation interval is still very long compared with crop plants. It currently takes around 12-16 years to make a new hybrid cross, evaluate progeny, select and test promising clones and scale up the best for operational use (Dehon et al. 2013). Add 8-10 years to grow the plantation and it is well over two decades before a return is earned from an initial breeding investment. For molecular breeding, we must add lead time needed to bring the costs of DNA sequencing down to a manageable level and complete proof of concept work, which is still needed to justify risks of moving the selection focus from fi eld performance to a molecular basis. Over such a period it is inevitable that markets and/or processing technology will change, compromising current assumptions about economic weights. Such uncertainty tends to encourage a conservative response in restricting breeding objectives to traits of universal benefi t such as high survival and volume production.
