Book Description

Over the past two decades U.S. lumber imports from the tropics have increased fourfold. Plywood trade, mostly from Asian sources, has soared forty-fold and now equals our domestic production. Log imports, though, have decreased drastically from about 100 million board feet (log scale) in the 1950's to 30 million currently. Much of the world timber trade now is in the form of processed material. Many more tropical wood species and species groupings are being made available to U.S. processors. Most of these have been well known for many years on the European markets. This interest in supplemental supplies from overseas is in both softwoods and hardwoods. An extensive foreign literature has described the properties and uses of tropical woods, but much of it is no longer readily available. In this country the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, over the years, issued 'Information Leaflets' or 'Foreign Wood Series' reports on some species of importance. But many of these are now out of print. The most recent comprehensive document, 'Properties of Imported Tropical Woods, ' contained a description of about 100 tropical genera.