Genetic variation of bark thickness and wet heart wood of intraspecific hybrid clones in Populus deltoides

The present research focused on the property of a number of traits such as volume, wet heart wood, straightness degree, tapering grade, bark thickness of 25 Populus deltoides intraspecific crossing clones. Anova analysis showed that there exhibited an extremely significant differences（Sig.＜0.01）and high repeatability (R0.58) of respective traits among the tested clones. Phenotype and genetic correlation analysis further revealed that properties of volume, wet heart wood, bark thickness, straight degree, tapering grade and diameter displayed significantly correlation with each other, and volume was lineally positive to the bark volume (r = 0.992), as well as the wet heart wood volume (r=0.596). When the selection rate was set to be 20%, the clones designated as 624, 609, 616, 629 and 623 were regarded to be phenotype-excellent candidates. The genetic gains of five clones on volume, diameter at ground height and breast height were 30.49%, 11.12% and 15.60%, respectively.