Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA) has awarded two 2008 Denis Cullity Fellowships to Australian scientists to further their knowledge and expertise overseas next year.
Dr Harry Wu, Theme Leader and Principal Research Scientist at Ensis Genetics in Canberra, and Dr Adam Redman, a research scientist in innovative forest products at the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, will develop knowledge of innovative techniques and capabilities to benefit the Australian forest and wood products industry.
Dr Wu will travel to France for four months to develop an understanding of the underlying mechanisms causing the adverse genetic correlation between wood stiffness (quality) and growth (volume) traits in radiata pine – Australia’s most significant timber species.
He will be hosted by the INRA Orléans, Unité d’Amélioration, Génétique et Physiologie Forestiéres (UAGPF) in Ardon, where he will study optimal breeding strategies to overcome or breed out this unfavourable genetic correlation, which is the most challenging technical issue in advanced breeding programs for radiata pine.
“I am looking for a long-term genetic solution to the problem of weaker wood (a larger proportion of juvenile core wood in harvested logs) which has resulted from 50 years’ breeding and silviculture to achieve faster growth and shorter rotation,” Dr Wu said.
He also expects to collaborate on development of a robust locus-based gene modelling system centred on the current population structure of the radiata pine breeding population in Australia, and to set up a framework for future collaborative research projects between CSIRO (Australia) and INRA (France).
Dr Redman will spend four months in France at the AgroParisTech - Engref - Center of Nancy, near Paris, where he hopes to develop expertise in vacuum wood drying of Australian commercial hardwoods – a significant knowledge gap in the local industry.
While drying timber to produce material for high quality applications is an expensive and time consuming operation, vacuum drying, now an established technology in Europe and North America, is greatly reducing drying time, lowering costs and improving grade recovery compared with conventional drying – the primary method used in Australia.
Dr Redman will use state-of-the-art equipment to obtain wood property data for the development of an accurate hardwood vacuum drying model incorporating checking and collapse degrade limitations.
FWPA’s Executive Director Dr Glen Kile said the Cullity Fellowship aimed to increase the value and benefits derived from completed research completed for the Australian forest and wood products industry.
The Fellowship was established in 2000 by FWPA’s predecessor, the Forest and Wood Products Research and Development Corporation (FWPRDC), in honour of the Corporation’s inaugural Chairman, Mr Denis M. Cullity CMG AO.