Wood Science and Tropical Forest Ecology

Dear Colleagues,

Tropical forests stockpile more than half of the terrestrial organic carbon. 98 % of this carbon is wood. The prominence of lignified tissues provides a resounding plea for implying wood research into investigations of the structure and function of tropical forests, their climatic buffering capacities and the resources they contain for local and global economies.

Several aspects of wood science support tropical forest ecology, management and conservation.

Analysis of wood traits help understanding the performance of individual trees. Together with properties, such as wood density, these traits hold key information for ecosystem models on carbon fluxes.

Carbon sequestration processes can be studied using retrospective growth analysis of pith-to-bark samples and through vegetation reconstructions from fossil wood and charcoal.

Wood technological endeavors provide the best understanding of which timber qualities are optimally-suited to which applications, and, as such, help to avoid wasting valuable materials.

Finally, public concern for the fate of tropical forests has resulted in the creation of a number of mechanisms for assuring biodiversity conservation and sustainable production of goods and services. Implementation and enforcement of these instruments very often imply various tools from the domain of wood science. Verification of the authenticity of a material is, for instance, done through microscopic or chemical identification.

Altogether, tropical wood science comprises a firm foundation of global change research. The Special Issue will illustrate this statement with papers on different applications of wood research.

Dr. Hans Beeckman
Guest Editor

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