From the beginning of the 70s of the XX century plus selection of the basic forest-forming wood species has become widely spread in Russia. But it was put in practice without theoretical ground and experimental data proving its efficiency. By the present time many researches of plus-trees growth in test cultures have been made, thus there appeared a real opportunity of this evaluation. But there are still very few articles devoted to this problem. Besides the printed data on this problem are very controversial, some of them recognize high efficiency of selection and the necessity of its further large-scale putting into practice of forest regeneration, some of them reject this program completely. The evaluation presented in the article is made on the basis of analysis of pine and spruce plus-trees growth in test cultures in the forestries of the Kirov region and the Undmurt republic within the period of 1980-1996. The test species in each experiment are represented by the posterity that had been grown from the mixture of seeds of 25-30 trees. They had been selected at random in the same forestry where the investigated plus-trees grow. It was stated that in one of 9 experiments with pine the families of plus-trees exceed the height of test species by 5 %. In other cases the average height of the families, as compared with the test species, is 95-100%. On average taking into account all the experiments, the height of the plus-trees seed posterity is not different from that of the test species. The research results of experiments with spruce plus-trees are similar. Out of 97 researched pine families only 2 families exceed the test species in a statistically significant way, out of 95 spruce families ¬– only 4 ones. Thus the amount of plus trees that can be attributed to pine elite is only 2.1%, of those that can be attributed to spruce elite is 4.2%. The results show that the first generation of half-sibs posterity does not show any signs of genetic improvement of the selected feature and that the efficiency of the mass selection of pine and spruce with the direct indications, i. e. height and diameter, is null. Thus, preliminary, the seeds taken from the first-order forest seed plots are not able to improve productivity of planted forests. Individual selection of pine and spruce, as compared with mass selection, can be very efficient as the height of the seed posterity of plus-trees that can be called elite statistically exceeds that of the test species – by 15-20%. That’s why using the seeds from second-order forest seed plots can contribute to genetic improvement of forests. But as the amount of elite trees is small, about 2-4%, such planting is very labour-intensive and thus is not practicable. So it is more effective to plant poly-clone second-order forest seed plots. The seeds that are got from them should be used only for planting cultures in conditions of high futility in order to get much timber within a short period of time. As the genetic changeableness is very low the usage of such seeds for growing ordinary cultures should be completely excluded. It is well-known that the problem of current importance for the modern forest complex of Russia consists in searching sources of forest raw materials, the amount of which is restricted in the European part. In Siberia they are inaccessible and ineffective because of low forest productivity. That’s why creating poly-clone seed plots of pine and of spruce as well as creating plantation cultures on their basis in the European part of the country helps to solve this problem of the forest complex in the most profitable way.

Note. Abstracts are published in author's edition