International Institute of Tropical Forestry

Title: Wood Densities of Tropical Tree Species.

Author: Reyes, Gisel; Brown,Sandra; Chapman,Jonathan; Lugo,Ariel E.

Date: 1992

Source: New Orleans, LA: USDA Forest Service, Southern Forest Experiment Station, Institute of Tropical Forestry; . 15 p. (Gen. Tech. Rep. SO; 88).

Station ID: GTR-SO-88

Description: Information on the biomass of tropical forests is critical in order to answer many questions on the role of these forests in global phenomena, including the global carbon and other nutrient cycles, and on the magnitude of the global wood resources. The biomass of tropical forests has been measured for a few sites scattered around the tropical world, but the area represented by these studies is extremely small (~30 ha) compared with the total area of tropical forests (about 18 million km2) (Brown and Lugo 1982). Furthermore, there is strong evidence that the selection of these few sites was biased toward high biomass forests (Brown and Lugo 1984). A vast quantity of forest inventory data is available for the tropics. These data often report stand and stock tables (number of trees per unit area and volume per unit area, respectively) by diameter class or total volume for areas that are representative of thousands of hectares of forests. The data are useful for estimating forest biomass by a variety of techniques (Brown and others 1989; Gillespie and others in press).

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Citation

Reyes, Gisel; Brown,Sandra; Chapman,Jonathan; Lugo,Ariel E.   1992.  Wood Densities of Tropical Tree Species..   New Orleans, LA: USDA Forest Service, Southern Forest Experiment Station, Institute of Tropical Forestry; . 15 p. (Gen. Tech. Rep. SO; 88)..