Ingo Ensminger

Spruced up: U of T biologist uses drones to help build a better tree

Ingo Ensminger, a biologist at University of Toronto Mississauga, is using a drone to help breed better spruce trees.

Ensminger and his collaborators are working on a suite of modern genomic resources to improve tree breeding and selection, using large white spruce progeny trials established in Quebec and Ontario by the Canadian Forest Service (CFS). This progeny data represents 20 years of tree-breeding research, where scientists have selected 2,000 different genetic lines of spruce seedlings; they expect to find spruce seedlings among those lines that will efficiently adapt to environmental stresses.

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