Many Michiganders think of poplars as junk trees.

Try thinking of them as wooden oil rigs instead.

Researchers at Michigan Technological University point out that poplars are common in Michigan, grow fast, and are easily modified to become outstanding sources for biofuels.

Not only that, but they are also very efficient gobblers of carbon dioxide.

Now, in a new ranking, Michigan Tech ranks in the top 20 institutions worldwide for the amount of poplar research that the school's scientists have published since 1990.

More than half a dozen researchers at Michigan Technological University conduct poplar research, many of them in Michigan Tech’s Biotechnology Research Center and Ecosystem Science Center. Their work -- and that of numerous graduate students -- has earned Michigan Tech's School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science 11th place among the top 20 institutions publishing papers on poplar research worldwide.

In a special issue on poplar research in Canada, published by the Canadian Journal of Botany, universities and other research institutions around the world were ranked according to the number of poplar research papers their scientists published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1990 and mid-2007.

Logging 436 published scientific papers during that time, the U.S. Forest Services topped the list. The University of Alberta in Canada ranked second with 356 poplar papers published.

Michigan Tech researchers published 158 poplar papers, earning the University 11th place, ahead of 12th-ranked Michigan State University. Michigan Tech and Michigan State were the only Michigan universities in the top 20.

Michigan Tech poplar researchers included Andrew Burton, Victor Busov, Scott Harding, Chandrashekhar Joshi, David Karnosky, Dana Richter and Chung-Jui Tsai with Karnosky publishing more than 60 papers since he came to Michigan Tech in 1983. Tsai, Joshi, Busov and one of Tech’s former graduate students co-authored a cover story in the internationally respected journal Science in 2006, reporting the first complete DNA sequence of a tree. The four-year, multi-institution study sequenced the entire genome of a poplar known as populus trichocarpa, commonly called black cottonwood.