Woods of the World

Everything Wood Users Need to Know

Woods of the World, a database of information on wood species.

Tree Talk, Inc., PO Box 426,

Burlington, VT 05402;

802/863-6789, 802/863-4344 (fax).

CD-ROM or diskettes $299, condensed diskette version $199.

The long-awaited

Woods of the World database from Tree Talk has arrived, and it was worth the wait. This ambitious project has made copious amounts of data about 800 wood species available in an attractive, user-friendly computer database. Information about woods that would have required hours of work in a well-stocked library is now not only accessible, but also provides easy cross-species comparisons.

The premise behind much of this work is that the world’s forests are being plundered to provide a handful of marketable wood species. In the process, hundreds of other equally useful woods are burned or left to rot, simply because they are not known in the global marketplace. Creating markets for these

lesser-known species is one way to increase the value of standing forests and empower local communities, thereby reducing the pressures causing deforestation. As explained by William McDonough, AIA, chair of the board of Tree Talk, “We have to start designing our products around what the forest is willing to give us.”

Together with the Academy of Natural Sciences, Tree Talk has taken a huge step towards providing wood users with the information they need to start using lesser-known species.

Woods of the World includes fields for 85 categories of data on each species, including physical characteristics, mechanical properties, woodworking traits, environmental status, regions of origin, and color photographs and micrographs of the sawn wood.

Not all the fields are filled for each species, however—only those for which reliable data were available. Dr. Charles Kaah, technical director of the project, explains for most North American species 70% to 80% of the fields are filled. For the lesser known species, however, the available data drops off significantly. To fill in gaps, users can edit most fields and add their own information. Tree Talk has also provided an incentive program for users to provide missing information on the woods, for use in updates to the program.

The database is all menu- and mouse-driven making it relatively easy to use. It is not particularly fast, so a recent-model personal computer (486-based PC or ’040-based Macintosh) is recommended. A color monitor is needed to take advantage of the many photos. There are so many categories of information that it takes a while to become familiar with the options, but once you’re comfortable with it, it offers some very powerful tools. It’s easy to call up a species you know (using common or scientific names) and then use characteristics of that species to search for possible replacements. A comparison mode allows you to view photographs of up to nine species at once.

The data can easily be edited by anyone using the computer on which it is installed, but access over a network can be restricted to read-only. Thus, institutions will probably want to provide access over a network (even though the current version is single-user only). On the whole there is a wealth of useful information here, and it should keep getting better as more species and more data on the current species are added.