Seed orchards (SO) represent the link between operational forestry and tree improvement. Globally, SO are the most common deployment scenario in forest tree breeding programmes. A variety of available designs have been used for new SO establishment and most of them are primarily focused on minimizing inbreeding. In our opinion, a good quality design should promote random mating too. With this in mind, the Optimum Neighbourhood Algorithm (ONA) was developed by Chaloupková et. al (2016).
ONA promotes panmixia in seed orchards due to the original heuristic algorithm, which is based on the fact that the most frequent gametic exchange occurs among close neighbours.
The current version of the software was programmed in the R language and the code is connected to a simple interface in Microsoft Excel.
