Current crops relate to key MNR priorities: biomass, invasive diseases/species at risk, ecosystem resilience
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| Darren Derbowka (centre) is OFRI's new acting growth facilities leader. Other staff working in the OFRI growth facilities this summer included Propagation Technician Kevin Maloney (left) and Summer Experience Student Brittany Nicholson. |
OFRI’s growth facilities are buzzing with activity, and there’s a new worker bee at the centre of it. Darren Derbowka is now the acting growth facilities leader, a one-year assignment while the permanent leader, Stew Blake, is on extended leave.
Derbowka came aboard in April, at a challenging but exciting time for the OFRI growth facilities. Depending where researchers are at with their research, some years are quiet ones.
“This year has been very busy, which has allowed me to dive right in and learn the ins and outs of our facilities,” Derbowka says. “I am enjoying being involved in so many interesting studies and interacting with many different people in the building, as well as researchers with other organizations such as Algoma University.”
Jump to another section of this article:
OFRI’s growth facilities: WOW!
What’s growing in OFRI’s greenhouses? 50,000 white pine for starters!
OFRI’s growth rooms and chambers: More control means more confidence in results
OFRI’s outdoor facilities: real world, less control
If you’d like to know more about OFRI’s facilities…
Derbowka is no stranger to research or to OFRI’s growth facilities. He has worked at OFRI for about a dozen years—first as a technician in the forest ecology, hardwood silviculture, and forest pathology research programs and then as a research forester in the genetics program, helping Research Geneticist Pengxin Lu to develop white pine hybrids that have resistance to blister rust and setting up OFRI’s somatic embryogenesis lab.
So what does a growth facilities leader do? Derbowka says communicating with scientists about their growing needs is Job 1: What do they need to grow, when, for how long, in which type of facility, and under what environmental conditions? He’s also responsible for:
- making sure they have all the right supplies to grow trees: seed, peat moss, perlite, fertilizer, planting trays, etc.
- coordinating growth facility tasks, such as stratifying seed (breaking its dormancy by cold-storing it), planting, tending, pest control, etc.
- monitoring trees and equipment and problemsolving if something’s amiss
“I spend a lot of time looking for things that are out of the ordinary,” Derbowka says. “Are we using the right soil mix? Watering enough or too much? Have any pests or fungal diseases cropped up? In any greenhouse, problems are bound to arise, but we work hard to prevent problems and address them quickly when they do occur.”
Derbowka points out that he is just one of several people who help grow research successes in OFRI’s growth facilities. Other members of the operations team are:
- Kevin Maloney, propagation technician, whose key responsibility is tending trees growing at OFRI, including mixing soils, sowing, propagating, transplanting, watering, fertilizing, etc.
- Randy Fawcett, facilities coordinator, who coordinates building operations and maintenance as well as contract and project management
- Rob Uhl of CBRE Canada, the organization contracted to look after OPS buildings, who keeps the equipment functioning
“It’s an excellent team,” Derbowka says. “They are very experienced with the OFRI growth facilities and have been hugely helpful to me during my first four months on the job.”
OFRI also has a new acting manager overseeing the growth facilities and all building operations, including reception and technology transfer: Sandra Wawryszyn. She is filling Ed Cappelli’s shoes until the end of the fiscal year, as he has taken a job in Peterborough.
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| Research Geneticist Pengxin Lu sprays a solution containing the fungus that causes blister rust on hybrid white pine seedlings. He says the OFRI growth rooms provide the ideal environment for inoculating seedlings and monitoring their resistance to disease. |
OFRI’s growth facilities: WOW!
Over the past 22 years, thousands of people have toured the OFRI building, and their response to the growth facilities usually includes the word wow.
“It is a premier facility for forest research,” says Environmental Stress Research Scientist Steve Colombo, who helped design the growth facilities in the late 1980s. “We’ve come a long way from the days when we had greenhouses with no air circulation and had to rig shade cloths by hand.”
OFRI Research Geneticist Pengxin Lu says, “OFRI’s growth facilities and arboretum were among the major factors that attracted me to work for MNR in 2000, and since then I have been one of the major users. The staff have managed the greenhouses, growth rooms, and growth chambers ideally for conducting various environment-controlled experiments, greatly facilitating the progress of my research, such as developing blister rust resistant white pine trees and studying the adaptation of forest trees to climate change. And OFRI’s spacious and well-maintained arboretum has provided a convenient and secure site to conserve the elite white pine trees we have bred for blister rust resistance.”
So what’s a growth facility? OFRI has two main types of in-house growth facilities: a) greenhouses and b) growth rooms and chambers. These facilities are controlled and monitored by computer, with manual overrides in case of emergency and alarm systems for when temperature, humidity, or carbon dioxide levels rise or fall too much.
“Each type of facility has pros and cons,” Derbowka says. “When we grow trees in a growth room or chamber, we have a higher level of control over growing conditions, so researchers can more precisely determine what’s affecting tree growth and development. We can also mimic summer-like conditions in winter or induce winter dormancy in trees when it’s summer.”
The advantage of the greenhouses is they have true daylight, but greenhouse staff have less control over temperature and other conditions. OFRI’s three types of greenhouses are:
- “gutter-connected” glass greenhouses for larger trials
- a polyhouse (plastic-covered greenhouse), used mostly to store trees with valuable genetic traits, such as disease resistance
- room-sized glass cubicle greenhouses for smaller experiments that may require isolation (researchers can conduct the same trial under varying conditions in multiple cubicles)
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| Greenhouse and research staff recently sowed 50,000 white pine—one of OFRI's largest crops ever—for planting as part of a biomass study at Petawawa Research Forest in 2013. |
What’s growing in OFRI’s greenhouses? 50,000 white pine for starters!
“The amount of control we have in our growth facilities is important for conducting research on seedlings, and they are very convenient for growing trees for field experiments,” says Hardwood Ecosystem Research Scientist Trevor Jones, who has two projects percolating in OFRI’s greenhouses.
For his first project, greenhouse and research staff are growing 50,000 white pine seedlings for planting at the Petawawa Research Forest in fall 2013. This crop is one of the largest in OFRI’s history.
“We need these trees for one of our biomass research sites,” Jones says. “We are determining how best to restore degraded mixedwood forests back to white pine after harvesting for biomass. Planting white pine is part of our regeneration strategy.”
For Jones’s second project, staff grew about 2,000 trees for a study on using ash from biomass boilers as seedling fertilizer, with sugar maple, yellow birch, white pine, red pine, and white spruce all in the mix.
”Fertilized and control seedlings will be measured, weighed, and compared after 16 weeks to see how well the fertilizer worked,” Jones says. “This study is part of a larger one led by the University of Toronto to determine how best to maximize use of fibre harvested for bioenergy while minimizing negative effects on the ecosystem.”
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| Pathology Research Forester Sylvia Greifenhagen discusses butternut canker research with former MNR Deputy Minister David Lindsay in one of the OFRI greenhouses. |
He notes that conducting this experiment in OFRI’s greenhouses means no travel costs and more control over the growing environment, so they can be more confident that differences in growth are due to the treatments and not major stressors such as drought, wildlife grazing, etc., that are bound to happen in a natural forest.
Seedling ecophysiology research scientist Bill Parker also has several tree species growing in OFRI’s greenhouses.
“We needed three conifer species and three hardwood species for a new study focused on how species, functional, and genetic diversity affect forest productivity, and in turn, the resilience of ecosystems to stressors such as climate change,” he explains. “Growth facilities staff are now growing white pine, white spruce, larch, sugar maple, red oak, and white birch for this study. It’s very helpful to have this capacity in house at OFRI.”
These trees will be planted at the OFRI arboretum next spring, both in groups of single species as well as various mixtures of species. “Half the study plots will also get a fertilization/irrigation treatment to enable us to determine how resource availability influences the relationship between diversity and productivity,” Parker says.
Sylvia Greifenhagen, a pathology research forester at OFRI, says having access to greenhouses year round allows her to safely overwinter potted butternut seedlings, grafts, and rootstock for studies on resistance to butternut canker.
“If we had to store these outside, the roots would freeze and die,” she says. “We also use the greenhouses to flush our root stock [wake it up in the spring] earlier in the year than they would do naturally so we can get our grafts going as soon as possible before the growing season gets rolling.”
So what’s next for the OFRI greenhouses? According to Derbowka, OFRI recently received a capital grant for the second of three planned upgrades to the greenhouse climate control systems.
“Last year we replaced the control systems for five of the cubicle greenhouses,” he reports. “This year, we will be bringing our four largest greenhouses into the new system, which will make it easier for us to ensure that climatic variables stay within the researchers’ specifications. Then hopefully next year we will do the same for the remaining five cubicle greenhouses.”
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| Chemical Lab Technologist Maara Packalen analyzes trace gas emissions from thawing peat samples in one of the OFRI growth rooms. |
OFRI’s growth rooms and chambers: More control means more confidence in results
On the other side of the OFRI building are the growth rooms and chambers, which look kind of like giant walk-in or reach-in refrigerators/freezers. But don’t look for milk or ice cream in these; instead you’ll find frozen soil/peat samples and tree parts, tree seedlings, or even ox-eye daisy or dog-strangling vine.
The ability of these rooms and chambers to produce conditions from very hot to very cold makes them useful for activities such as:
- determining how well trees from seed from various locations perform under a range of climate conditions, to help determine how far to move tree seed as the climate changes
- stratifying seed (subjecting it to cold to break its dormancy) before sowing
- storing frozen samples/tree cookies so they don’t spoil (or in the case of tree cookies, crack) before analysis
- getting trees to go into winter dormancy even if it’s not actually winter or break bud even if it’s not spring
- testing trace gas emissions from peat samples in very cold conditions
- drying out plant parts under high heat to determine their dry weight
- evaluating whether size and weight of tree seed matters for successful germination
- culturing fungi samples taken from trees in the field to help identify which fungi are affecting which trees
So why are flowers and invasive plants growing in a forest research institute? OFRI has a research agreement with Algoma University, and researchers with the university’s Invasive Species Research Institute are using OFRI’s facilities to study how invasive species grow, develop, and compete with native plants.
“The OFRI growth rooms and chambers give us a very high level of control over temperature, light, humidity, and soil moisture and help make sure that our controlled-environment experiments meet the highest standards,” says Pedro Antunes, who heads the Invasive Species Research Institute. “Having access to these facilities has been very helpful to us in our work on invasive terrestrial plants.”
The newest additions are growth chambers that allow researchers to test trees’ responses to increased carbon dioxide. “These growth chambers give us tremendous ability to determine how trees will respond to climate change,” Colombo says.
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| Summer Experience Student Meghan Garside measures the stem of an eastern white cedar seedling planted as part of a herbicide tolerance study at OFRI's arboretum outside Sault Ste. Marie. |
OFRI’s outdoor facilities: real world, less control
The OFRI arboretum, a 95 hectare tree farm outside Sault Ste. Marie, is also part of OFRI’s growth facilities. It has even more of a natural setting but still allows some control over conditions, and it’s only a short drive from OFRI.
For example, Biochemistry Research Scientist Tom Noland needed to test growing Canada yew outdoors and planted his seedlings at the arboretum, but the deer were eating them. “We were able to build a fence so we could complete the experiment, Noland says. “That’s something that would be difficult to do for research plots in the forest.”
The Canada yew research is done, but Noland is now using the fenced area at the arboretum to study how well eastern white cedar tolerates herbicides.
Derbowka notes that the OFRI Arboretum also houses several genetic archives, living libraries of trees with a known genetic heritage that have valuable traits such as superior growth or resistance to disease. Researchers today or even decades from now will be able to consult permanent records for and take cuttings from those trees to use in research or operational plantings.
Beyond the growth facilities, OFRI also has hundreds of research plots across Ontario. The plots offer researchers real world conditions but the least amount of control—and can take many hours to travel to. What’s more, both seedlings and environmental monitoring equipment can suffer the ravages of weather and hungry/curious wildlife.
“Real world conditions can present some interesting challenges for research,” Bill Parker points out. “For example, we had to resort to using surplus MNR fire hoses to protect cords on monitoring equipment from rodents and other wildlife [method documented in OFRI Research Note No 60; order PDF].
“On the other hand, many other factors affect tree growth, and not all those can be applied indoors,” Parker concludes. “The key is to select the research facility that best suits your specific research objective.”
If you’d like to know more about OFRI’s growth facilities…
…contact Darren Derbowka. If you’d like to know more about any of the research mentioned in this article, contact the researcher directly.
