Chestnut Improvement Network

Topic: Chestnut,

Visit the Chestnut Improvement Network Website

Personnel:
Dr. Ron Revord, Assistant Research Professor
Dr. Mike Gold, Associate Director, Professor
Dr. Nick Meier, Sr. Research Specialist
J. Bryan Webber, Sr. Research Specialist

Partners:
Dr. Greg Miller, Empire Chestnut Company
Dr. Jeanne Romero-Severson, University of Notre Dame

Funding source: USDA Agriculture Marketing Service, Grant Agreement no. AM190200XXXXG010

Overview

Over the past half-century, chestnut growers, enthusiasts, and scientists have collected, circulated, and evaluated a genetically diverse array of chestnuts to adapt cultivated forms to their respective environments. Many improved selections have been made from these early works and used to parent the current generation of seedling orchards in the eastern half of the United States. These seedling orchards support successful commercial opportunities and are in cultivation across an increasing number of geographies and climates.

Seedling orchards offer a basis for continued genetic improvement and selection within growers’ environments. Over the past 15-years, the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry (UMCA) and select growers have made open-pollinated seed from the Center’s repository and other elite on-farm selections available to growers – adding valuable structure and diversity to on-farm improvement. We now have an extraordinary opportunity to evaluate and select the next generation’s breeding parents, landraces, and scion cultivars from these seedling orchards as they reach mature nut-bearing years.

 In 2021, the UMCA and chestnut growers established the Chestnut Improvement Network (CIN) to formalize on-farm evaluation and selection efforts as the beginning of a new decentralized, participatory breeding program. The network is designed to advance the next generation of progeny for cultivation in seedling orchards and so that growers are participating throughout the breeding process. Thus far, the network consists of 42 growers representing 11 states. In our first season, evaluations began on 284 elite grower selections for field traits (7), leaf morphology (5), nut quality (16), pests and disease (7). We expect CIN to have over 600 seedling trees under evaluation.

New pedigrees schemes will be designed based on these evaluations, in conjunction with EST-SSR fingerprinting that resolve selection parentage and complex Castanea spp. ancestry. Preferred UMCA repository cultivars will be more systematically utilized based on learned ancestry and combining abilities. On-farm selections will be integrated into pedigrees where they lend themselves as improvements for participants’ environments. The resulting offspring will be decentralized to network participants as the next generation’s improved seedling orchards.

Starting in 2021, CIN expects to develop around 10,000 full-sibling seedlings annually. Network growers will benefit from early access to advanced selections and new seedling populations, and new plantings will continue to serve the dual purpose of production orchards and breeding populations as we seek to adapt our germplasm to on-farm target environments across this broad geography. 

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Mission, Purpose, and Function

The CIN is an organized collaboration between chestnut growers and the UMCA primarily aimed at genetic improvement of chestnuts as a crop.

  • The CIN is a non-profit corporation that engages exclusively in scientific and educational pursuits to benefit its members and the chestnut industry.
  • Member-growers cultivate the breeding program populations over a broad geographic range, covering central and eastern USA.
  • UMCA provides technical guidance, data handling, laboratory analysis, information dissemination, and logistical coordination.
  • Growers and academics share responsibility in developing breeding goals, distributing propagative materials, handling intellectual property, securing and distributing funding,  governance, and other decision-making.

Vision

A large, decentralized community of cooperating participants dedicated to the inherently long-term endeavor of tree crop breeding can achieve beneficial results quicker and more efficiently than individual growers or academic institutions working independently.

Goals and Activities:

  • Formalize the CIN
  • Develop selection criteria and methods for participant-lead on-farm evaluations
  • Coordinated curation and circulation of new breeding selections and their progeny amongst the network
  • Expand genetic resources to support industry growth:
  • Scion blocks and seed orchards of desired cultivars
  • Applied genomics tools

Chestnut Breeding Objectives

Germplasm improvement in the U.S. is in its early stages. Ample opportunity for improvement exists through combining traits that underlie high-yielding and excellent nut quality into select individuals and populations, and equally important, we’ve yet to discover what germplasm is best adapted and stable-yielding across growers’ diverse target environments.

  1. Define targets environments that represent our grower participants
  2. Finding parental combinations with favorable combining abilities, where seedlings can be successfully used for orchard production
  3. Improved seed and scion populations for
  4. Interannual stability
  5. Agronomic traits – architectural, phenological, adaptability, pests, and disease
  6. Nut and kernel quality – storability, minimize defects, size, and flavor
CIN-flyer-p2-9-29

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