Future Importance of Knowing and Manipulating Wood Variability

Abstract

The importance of wood variability is closely related to the product and quality needs of the future. Numerous symposia, such as “Impacts of the Changing Quality of Timber Resources” (Porterfield and Crist 1978) or “Utilization of the Changing Wood Resource of the Southern United States” held in Raleigh North Carolina at N.C. State University in June, 1984, deal with the subject, which is of great concern to the forest industry. In 1980, Preston stated it as: “increasingly inadequate supplies of preferred species is accompanied world wide by a decreasing supply of trees of large size and high quality… industry is continuously facing the necessity of substitution, often simultaneously, of non-traditional species, size and quality for preferred raw material. This is a powerful driving force for technological advancement which moves us ever closer to … produce needed wood products from an indiscriminate mix of forest biomass.”