Optimizing Wood Utilization Based on Whole Tree Inherent Property Maps

Abstract

The forest industry is in a state of change currently in Canada. The past strengths of the industry have been a steady supply of high-quality lumber and paper products for over a century. More recently, as we move to second-growth forests and plantations, we are recognizing that wood properties have changed and are extremely variable across the landscape. To this end, the government of Ontario created a Forest Resource Inventory to better deal with the resource and supply a map of the resource to be used by industry in their management planning practices. This has lead government and industry to realize the inventory of basic parameters such as species composition and general heights which is not adequate in today’s global economy and markets. Competition from other regions of the world has forced the industry in Canada to look at how we do business and how we can remain competitive in global markets with fast-growing southern hemisphere plantations of pines and eucalypts. In order to better utilize every stick of wood we cut, a better knowledge of the inherent wood properties for trees and whole landscapes is required. In addition, a method of collecting this information efficiently and cost-effectively is also required where data are collected and stored without losses or errors being introduced to the database system. This paper presents a method of both collecting the data accurately while bringing human error to a minimum and nondestructively lessening the cost of collecting the data. This method represents a new way of looking at inventory where inherent properties dictate the inventory and how we assess the forest across a landscape. We have shown that we can produce landscape property maps using a newly developed Wood Science App that both collects data in the field and controls it but also is linked to the information database in our laboratory eliminating the need for people to enter data. In addition, the App controls the testing equipment in the laboratories, which removes another level of potential error in the database system. The whole mapping system developed in the Lakehead University Wood Science & Testing Facility (LUWSTF) is designed to allow a better system both to test wood properties in the laboratories and also to collect field information in a nondestructive manner to map wood properties across the landscape. This will not only assist current industries in managing their forest resources but also act as a promotional tool for attracting new investment into the region.