IUFRO 2.09.01 Seed orchards Background 2007-October 2008
(A documentation how the idea arose and how the administrative turns occurred, the degree of details will be reduced)

Short history: A long time ago (roughly 20 years ago), there were IUFRO WPs on Breeding Theory (2.04.02), Progeny Testing (2.04.03) and Seed Orchards (2.04.04). In 1986, Breeding Theory and Progeny Testing were combined and recreated as ‘Breeding theory and progeny testing (2.04.02), but Seed Orchards WP died and never came out till 2007. When planning for the Umeå conference 2007, Bailian Li (Division 2 coordinator) proposed to link it to IUFRO, but as there was no working party for Seed Orchards, the question was raised: Why is there no IUFRO unit for something so important. It seems to be discussed on regional meetings and sometimes also a speciality is discussed in a IUFRO meeting (e.g. Larch seed orchards was discussed as a minor activity at a meeting 2007 with IUFRO Working Party S2.02.07 (Larch Breeding and Genetic Resources). But overall it is few seed orchard lectures at conferences, and the number of lectures of the subject is decreasing. But seed orchards ought to be more important. Quantitatively more seeds come from seed orchards, and the genetic gain from seed orchards is increasing, and much accumulated knowledge becomes available.  So the reason for having a IUFRO unit focusing on seed orchards seem to be increasing! Thus we started efforts to get an IUFRO working party on seed orchards established. After a remarkable long and rather frustrating process with no understandable reasons for the repeated delays, a working party was finally inaugurated in October 2008.

Oct08  For some reasons it seemed needed to have a further prolonged process by the IUFRO board ending in that we got a working party within a reorganised research group, and new coordinator for both the research group and working party was Kyu-Suk Kang.

IUFRO Division 2 current structure: http://www.iufro.org/science/divisions/division-2/ for statutes of IUFRO go to membership first

Last edit Dag Lindgren 09013