We have 7 technology centers – one each in Canada, Israel and China and 4 in Brazil. These centers are dedicated to the development of forest and forest product improvement to make our tree farms more productive and sustainable and to improve the quality and range of the products we offer.

Our biotechnology subsidiary, FuturaGene, is focused on enhancing forest and mill productivity and protecting our tree farms from diseases and pest by using state-of-the art genetic engineering and gene editing tools. In addition, FuturaGene develops and utilizes novel biotechnology tools including bioinformatics, genomics, genetic markers, new breeding techniques and specialized in vitro culture methods to address forestry challenges such as climate change and forest protection.

Our forest innovation efforts focused on yield enhancement enable eucalyptus farms to produce the same amount of wood using less land. This reduces pressure on natural forest and lowers carbon emissions from transport, due to reduced distance between the field and the mills. Our technologies for yield protection are aimed at lowering chemical usage, improving yields by averting damage caused by herbicide drift in weed control operations, preserving soil structure, decreasing defoliation and other damage caused by insect pests in the tree farms and improving labour conditions.

Suzano’s breeding program is responsible for developing and making the recommendation of clones for operational eucalyptus farms. We explore the natural genetic diversity of the genus Eucalyptus, which is composed of more than 700 species, that allow us generating new eucalyptus hybrids by crossings between different species. We explore this genetic variability to select clones that are: more adapted to different environments, more productive and more resilient to both biotic (pest and diseases) and abiotic (drought, heat, frost, flooding, etc.) stresses.

Our breeding program is more than 60 years old. During this time, we have been using the most modern breeding strategies, and more recently, we are widely using molecular marker technology to assure the quality of our processes through genetic certification, to better understand the genetic variability of our eucalyptus germplasm, and to improve the accuracy and precision of the selection of clones more productively, through the use of genomic approaches like genome wide selection. Furthermore, we are developing imaging tools to better and more precisely phenotype different traits, for instance, to measure the height of the trees.

Another great innovation in breeding is the development of a system called Tetrys, which is being used by breeders to aid the allocation of clones in Suzano´s multiple operational environments. This system maximizes the forest productivity (MAIcel) by exploring the best clone by environment interaction, while taking into consideration the risk associated with diseases and climatic variation.

Aiming at the mitigation of climate change impacts in eucalyptus farms, we have several project initiatives in our portfolio. One of these initiatives is the introduction and testing of Corymbia, which is a genus evolutionarily related to Eucalyptus, and is known to be more tolerant to some (a)biotic stresses. A second initiative, a project called DryMax, seeks to cross our core elite breeding population with Eucalyptus species more tolerant to drought, in order to develop more resilient eucalyptus clones, and to better understand the mechanisms involved in drought tolerance.

It is superlative to emphasize the great synergy between Breeding and FuturaGene teams. Breeding generates and provides the best parents and clones to be used by FuturaGene in plant transformation to insert traits of interest (e.g. herbicide tolerance, etc.). Once these traits are transferred to our elite germplasm, breeding can perform new crosses to quickly introgress the traits into our breeding population and generate new clones carrying such differential trait.