2007 Research Highlights

Research Area:
Forest Service Strategic Goal 1: Reduce the risk from catastrophic wildland fire.
SPA: Fire

Effects of growth suppression on wood fiber properties

Key Contact: J.Y. Zhu, jzhu@fs.fed.us
Partners: Ponderosa Newsprint Corporation, Ponderay Valley Fiber Corporation, University of Idaho and the Pacific Northwest Research Station

Growing conditions strongly influence the wood and fiber characteristics of the resulting trees. Much of the wood that needs to be removed from overgrown forests is suppressed growth and differs from more conventional wood sources in wood density and wood fiber dimensions. Just measuring growth rings and fiber dimensions in suppressed growth wood can be challenging in that some automated instruments do not have sufficient resolution to detect growth rings less than a couple of mm. The influence of growing conditions can also be observed in plantation settings where initial planting density influences growth rates and with it, wood density and fiber dimensions. The two peer reviewed papers and three conference proceedings published in FY-07 address instrumentation to automate growth ring analysis, and the impact of plantation density on wood and fiber properties of red pine.

Yes. Previous research in this project performed mill scale evaluations of small diameter pines from a forest thinnings project. The recent work is relating similar anatomical effects at lower levels of growth suppression and instrument development work that was carried out at FPL to improve growth ring analysis of trees from heavily suppressed environments.