Siberian spruce | |
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Young Siberian spruce trees, Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug (Russia) | |
Scientific classification ![]() | |
Kingdom: | Plantae |
Clade: | Tracheophytes |
Clade: | Gymnospermae |
Division: | Pinophyta |
Class: | Pinopsida |
Order: | Pinales |
Family: | Pinaceae |
Genus: | Picea |
Species: | P. obovata |
Binomial name | |
Picea obovata | |
Synonyms [2] | |
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Picea obovata, the Siberian spruce, is a spruce native to Siberia, from the Ural Mountains east to Magadan Oblast, and from the Arctic tree line south to the Altay Mountains in northwestern Mongolia.
It is a medium-sized evergreen tree growing to 15–35 m tall, and with a trunk diameter of up to 1.5 m, and a conical crown with drooping branchlets. The shoots are orange-brown, with variably scattered to dense pubescence. The leaves are needle-like, 1–2 cm long, rhombic in cross-section, shiny green to grayish-green with inconspicuous stomatal lines; the leaves subtending a bud are distinctively angled out at a greater angle than the rest of the leaves (a character shared by only two or three other spruces). The cones are cylindric-conic, 5–10 cm long and 1.5–2 cm broad, green or purple, maturing glossy brown 4–6 months after pollination, and have stiff, smoothly rounded scales. The specific name obovata means "egg-shaped."
It is an important timber tree in Russia, the wood being used for general construction and paper making. The leaves are used to make spruce beer.
Siberian spruce cone-scales are used as food by the caterpillars of the tortrix moth Cydia illutana .
Due to their hardness and flexibility, planks made from untreated siberian spruce are the material of choice for the surfaces of modern world-class velodromes [3] [4] .
Siberian spruce and Norway spruce ( Picea abies ) have turned out to be extremely similar genetically and might be considered two closely related subspecies of P. abies. [5]
Siberian spruce hybridises extensively with Norway spruce where the two species (or subspecies) meet in northeastern Europe; trees over a broad area from extreme northeast Norway and Sweden, northern Finland east to the Ural Mountains are classified as the hybrid Picea × fennica (Regel) Komarov (or P. abies subsp. ×fennica, if the two taxa are considered subspecies); they differ from typical P. obovata from east of the Urals in having cones with less smoothly rounded, often triangular-pointed, scales.