Genotyping-by-sequencing of 103 Irish black alder trees

This dataset has two linked parts from the Irish A. glutinosa breeding and improvement programme, begun in 2005. (1) Genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) reads from 103 plus-trees held in the Teagasc Oak Park clonal gene-bank (NCBI SRA). After variant calling and filtering these yielded 95,139 SNPs, which were used to assess genetic diversity, population structure and genomic relatedness. (2) Height and diameter-at-breast-height (DBH) measurements, 2008-2020, from a replicated half-sib progeny trial at Corcovety, Co. Cavan, with R scripts for data processing and genomic prediction (Zenodo). The trial holds 88 open-pollinated half-sib families raised from plus-tree seed plus one commercial seed control. The plus-trees showed high genetic diversity and no evidence of inbreeding. Heritability of relative growth was 0.45-0.53 for height and 0.28-0.31 for DBH. Genomic prediction (GBLUP) gave low-to-moderate predictive ability for height and negligible predictive ability for DBH.