Early evaluation of open pollinated offspring from Polish seedling seed orchards of Pinus sylvestris L.

Field trials with open-pollinated progeny of Scots pine were established in 2004 at five climatically different sites of the Polish lowlands. This long-term experiment was aimed to compare the genetic variation and genetic value of the offspring of twenty two seedling seed orchards and two second-generation seed orchard with the offspring of the local so-called economic seed stands, which are the main source of seeds for artificial regeneration of Scots pine in Poland. The early evaluation of quantitative traits of cones, seeds and 1-year-old seedlings attests to remarkable variation between the studied populations. Significant linear correlatios were found between some of the studied traits.