An early focus on structural use of processed rather than round timber resulted in an underestimation of the structural advantages of retaining the natural form of small-diameter round timber. In the round and tapered form, timbers are not susceptible to the strength-reducing effects of diving grain and exposed juvenile wood. Fiber continuity around knots on the surface of a debarked log rarely...

Intensive forest-management practices have been shown to greatly increase the growth rates of southern pines. A joint study was undertaken to evaluate the wood and pulp quality from fast-grown 14,year-old loblolly pine from the Piedmont and 17-year-old slash pine from the Coastal Plain. The properties were compared to 24-year-old plantation-grown controls. Three sets of chip samples, sawmill re...

Substantial amounts of dead wood in the intertidal zone of mature mangrove forests are tunnelled by teredinid bivalves. When the tunnels are exposed, animals are able to use tunnels as refuges. In this study, the effect of teredinid tunnelling upon mangrove forest faunal diversity was investigated. Mangrove forests exposed to long emersion times had fewer teredinid tunnels in wood and wood not ...

Quantitative and qualitative data are presented for seven species of four genera of Resedaceae. Newly reported for the family are helical striations in vessels, vasicentric and marginal axial parenchyma, procumbent ray cells, and perforated ray cells. Wood features of Resedaceae may be found in one or more of the families of Capparales close to it (Brassicaceae, Capparaceae, Tovariaceae). Lack ...

Latent class regression is a statistical method which is not well known in wood science for predicting distortion of sawn timber from structural wood characteristics. The method identifies unknown subgroups in a dataset and allows more accurate regression models to be derived. We identified two separate classes to describe the relationship between bowdry, springdry, or twistdry and the predicto...

The aim of this study was to observe the radial shrinkage of Norway spruce [Picea abies (L. Karst.)] trunkwood specimens with different hydraulic vulnerability to cavitation from the fully saturated state until the overall shrinkage reaches a stable value, and to relate wood shrinkage and recovery from shrinkage to cavitations of the water column inside the tracheids. Radial shrinkage processes...

Recent advances in genomics and proteomics have provided an excellent opportunity to understand complex biological processes such as wood formation at the gene and protein levels. The aim of this work was to describe the proteins participating in the processes involved in juvenile wood formation by isolating proteins from the cambial region of Eucalyptus grandis, at three ages of growth (6-mont...

The effects of two treatments, irrigation and fertilization, were examined on specific gravity (SG)-related wood properties of loblolly pine trees (Pinus taeda L.) grown in Scotland County, North Carolina. The effects on the core as a whole, on the juvenile core, on the mature core, and from year to year were all analyzed. The results indicate that fertilization significantly lowered latewood S...

Fragrant agarwood, arguably the costliest wood in the world, is formed by plant-fungal interactions in Aquilaria spp. However, very little is known about this fragrant outcome of interaction. Therefore, mimicking the ancient traditions of agarwood production in Assam (Northeast India), a chemometric assessment of the agarwood-fungus interaction was made by chemical profiling (GC-MS) coupled wit...

Despite the importance of Eucalyptus spp. in the pulp and paper industry, functional genomic approaches have only recently been applied to understand wood formation in this genus. We attempted to establish a global view of gene expression in the juvenile cambial region of Eucalyptus grandis Hill ex Maiden. The expression profile was obtained from serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) librar...