Species comparison of the physical properties of loblolly and slash pine wood and bark

Abstract

Composition of the southern pine forest is now predominated by two species, loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) and slash pine (Pinus elliottii Engelm.), owing to fire suppression activities, natural regeneration on abandoned agricultural lands, and extensive planting. Comparison of the wood and bark physical properties of these pines is of interest in terms of the yields of usable biomass and, for the bark, its ecological functionality on a living tree. Trees from a species comparison study were used to generate wood and bark property data, on a whole-tree basis, and for stem disks collected at breast height. Models were constructed to explain the effect of relative height on wood and bark properties. When comparing the whole-tree data, slash pine wood (0.523 versus 0.498) and bark (0.368 versus 0.311) specific gravity values were higher, both offset by lower moisture contents; slash pine also produced a higher percentage of bark on a dry-mass basis (17% versus 12.5%). Unlike wood properties, bark properties showed significant between-species differences when determined at breast height alone, the exception being moisture content. In terms of yield, harvests of a green tonne of loblolly pine and slash pine would give approximately the same dry mass of wood, but slash pine provides more bark.

Effects of site and tree size on wood density and bark properties of Lebombo ironwood (Androstachys johnsonii Prain)

“…The average bark mass reported in this study (19%) was larger than that reported by Eberhardt et al (2017) for Pinus taeda (12.5%) and Pinus elliottii (17%). The pattern of variation of bark mass and bark thickness were in agreement with that reported by Quilhó and Pereira (2001) and Cellini et al (2012): bark mass was site independent and increased with relative height up the stem.…”

Models to predict whole-disk specific gravity and moisture content in planted longleaf pine from cutover and old field sites

“…Given the rapid growth rate and high defect rate, there are questions about the quality of planted longleaf pine and how it relates to current perceptions of longleaf pine, which are based on slow growing and naturally regenerated longleaf pine. A significant amount of information is available on the wood and fiber quality of planted loblolly pine (Mora et al 2007;Jordan et al 2008;Antony et al 2015;Dahlen et al 2018;Schimleck et al 2018), and to a lesser extent slash pine (Eberhardt et al 2017), however, there is little information available on the wood quality of planted longleaf pine. The wood quality information on planted longleaf pine that does exist (Baldwin and Saucier 1983;Gibson et al 1986;Clark and Schmidtling 1989) was measured prior to the recent restoration efforts and had much higher planting densities (2470 trees ha -1 to 3700 trees ha -1 ) (Baldwin and Saucier 1983;Gibson et al 1986) compared to current practices for establishing planted longleaf pine (1235 trees ha -1 ) (South 2006).…”

“…(MC) of the wood and bark is important (Eberhardt et al 2017). Bark is typically burned for energy, however bark properties are also of interest with regards to other bioenergy applications and for bioproducts (Baker et al 2012).…”

“…Wood Moisture Content Model Development D r a f t As wood SG increases, the amount of water within the cell decreases as does the maximum MC (Glass and Zelinka 2010). Within a species, higher SG wood tends to have lower green MC (Antony et al 2015;Eberhardt et al 2017;Dahlen et al 2020b). Because of this, we fitted wood MC as a function of wood SG rather than fitting wood MC as a function of relative height.…”

“…To predict the trend in the data for bark SG with respect to relative height, a threeparameter nonlinear model used by Eberhardt et al (2017) and adapted from Ratkowsky (1990) was used. The base bark SG model was:…”