Ross Whetten
Professor
Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources
Jordan Hall Addition 5231
Area(s) of Expertise
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Research website
https://research.cnr.ncsu.edu/sites/moleculartreebreeding/
Education
B.S., Arizona State University (1981)
Ph.D., Vanderbilt University (1988)
Research Interests
Applications of molecular biology methods to solve practical problems in management of natural or planted populations of forest trees, with an emphasis on conifer species native to the southeastern USA. Massively-parallel or “next-generation” DNA sequencing technologies provide new opportunities to detect and analyze genetic variation in forest tree populations, and my research is focused on development and application of both new laboratory methods to generate data and new analytical methods to understand how genetic variation is related to variation in traits of ecological or economic importance.
Courses
FOR 350 – Ethics in Natural Resource Management
FOR 411 – Forest Biology and Genetics
FOR 725 – Advanced Forest Genetics
BIT815 – Analysis of Deep Sequencing Data
Publications
- Optimal seed deployment under climate change using spatial models: Application to loblolly pine in the Southeastern US (2017)
- Correspondence of loblolly pine response for fusiform rust disease from local and wide-ranging tests in the Southern United States (2017)
- Advances in ecological genomics in forest trees and applications to genetic resources conservation and breeding (2017)
- Variation among loblolly pine seed sources across diverse environments in the southeastern United States (2017)
- Ecological genomics of local adaptation in cornus florida l. By genotyping by sequencing (2017)
- Quantitative trait loci influencing forking defects in an outbred pedigree of loblolly pine (2016)
- Genetic variability and heritability of chlorophyll a fluorescence parameters in Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) (2016)
- Modeling climate change effects on the height growth of loblolly pine (2015)
- Decoding the massive genome of loblolly pine using haploid DNA and novel assembly strategies (2014)
- Genetics of stem forking and ramicorn branches in a cloned loblolly pine family (2014)