Southern Hardwood Varietal Forestry: A New Approach to Short-Rotation Woody Crops for Biomass Energy

Varietal forestry appears poised to make significant contributions to the production of woody crops for timber, pulp and paper, and biomass energy in the southeastern United States. The projected productivity gains with southern pine somatic seedling technology make a strong case for adopting parallel technologies with southern hardwoods. Systems for producing somatic seedlings of multiple southern hardwoods have been developed and in some aspects are already more amenable to scale-up and manipulation than conifer systems. The feasibility of scaling up production of elite, varietal hardwoods using somatic embryogenesis has already been established. By combining this propagation system with hybrid breeding, thousands of somatic seedlings of elite hybrid sweetgum and hybrid yellow-poplar have been generated, some of which have shown impressive biomass productivity in field tests. Varietal, blight-resistant chestnuts now being developed may have even greater potential to be deployed for biomass plantations and other applications in the southern Appalachians.