as a tag-on to that topic... Douglas-fir (native only to the western part of North America) outperforms native species like crazy in New Zealand. So thousands upon thousands of acres of that country was planted to it, and within about 10 years the market is going to be flooded with widegrained lumber from there courtesy Weyerhauser.
The other: you may have heard of white pine blister rust... the CCC removed millions of its alternate hosts, wild currants and gooseberries, in the 1930's in an attempt to protect the very valuable sugar pine and white pine... to no avail, as one missed plant cast spores over thousands of acres. Anyway, we sent a lot of sugar pine seeds to Spain to make sure there was a source of seed in the future if sugar pine was wiped out here.... the disease doesn't exist over there, but it was found out that the growth rates were beyond any in its natural range.
Researchers managed to wipe out many sugar pines here... they located the rarest of the rare, trees that were resistant to the disease... and created a huge seed orchard in the 50's so that rust resistant trees could be the parents of the future. Well... the blister rust mutated to overcome the resistance in the orchard as all of the resistant trees were in one place, resulting in a super strain of the disease that overcomes even the most resistant trees... because they forgot that rust can mutate in its short life cycle many many times faster than sugar pines can grow to sexual maturity. Honest mistake, i guess, but a tragedy if you are a sugar pine. (Sugar pine is the white, fragrant wood often used in the past for moldings and sashes, as it has straight grain and few knots because it is a fire adapted species and the lower limbs in the old growth were burned away, creating clear wood in the bottom log or two)
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