Growth and geographic relationship of Swietenia macrophylla King in common garden tests: a nursery and a two-year field

Swietenia macrophylla King (wide leaf mahagony) is a valuable tree for furniture supply, whereas in Indonesia, it is only grown on specific islands. To initiate its genetic improvement, this experiment observed growth variations of different seed sources. In a nursery experiment, four seed sources of Banjar-West Java, Kulonprogo-Yogyakarta, Bondowoso-East Java, and Lombok-West Nusa Tenggara were assessed, with six parental trees per seed source, consisting of 20 seeds per parental tree and replicated into 5. Meanwhile, the experimental progeny test in the field using the same seed sources consisted of 48 families with 6 replications. Anova analysis at the nursery level found differences in all characters for germination rate, seedling height, and root collar diameter. Meanwhile, at the progeny test, the variance analysis showed a significant difference between seed sources for all parameters observed. Positive or negative correlations have been revealed between growth traits and elevation, longitude, latitude, temperature, and precipitation of the seed sources. Diameters with a moderate narrow-sense individual heritability value of h2i = 0.35 and h2i = 0.15 for height were found in this study.