Competition effects in a young Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis, Bong. Carr) clonal trial

In the analysis of forestry experiments, there may be a need to adjust for competition between plots before predicting deployment performance in the field but there have been few attempts to investigate this. Our analysis looked at diameter data from a 19-year old Sitka spruce clonal trial growing in Scotland. Using a sequence of nested models, a likelihood ratio test indicated that fitting competition at both the genetic and residual level provided a significantly better fit than models which either ignored competition or fitted it at just the genetic or just the residual level. A strong negative genetic correlation of –0.93±0.05 was found between the direct genetic effects and competition effects. This was not significantly different from –1, indicating that competition is almost exactly proportional to the direct genetic effect and that a tree will exert a competitive effect which is closely related to its own genetic merit for size. At the residual level, the correlation between direct and competition effect was estimated as –0.17±0.03. We conclude that competition exists at both the genetic and environmental levels and including it in genetic evaluation systems gives a better prediction of future performance. Results also demonstrate that it is possible to obtain useful information about competition effects from a single-tree plot experiment.