Evaluation of Wood Quality of Underutilized Indigenous Timber Species for Reducing Timber Scarcity: A Case of Mizoram, North-East India

Abstract

Timber demand and supply gap has widened over the last few decades across different regions of the world. Indian scenario is no different. In the last decade though India’s forest cover has increased at a very slow pace, in north eastern part of India, there is a loss of forest cover at an alarming rate. This is a cause of concern for this region which is already depending only on handful of quality timbers for the structural and commercial purposes. Under this scenario, few alternative options should be looked at like exploring promising indigenous fast-growing species, or exploring some lesser-known timber species available naturally in the forest. Therefore, wood quality parameters of such timber species should be tested so as to know the specific utility of these timbers. In this study of Mizoram, wood quality parameters of five underutilized timber species were assessed and three out of five species have shown considerable quality as compared to Teak and many other mainstream species. Few selected properties are highlighted in this paper to indicate possible utility of selected species to reduce the gap in demand and supply of wood as raw material. We focused mainly on anatomical properties, gross features and cell constituents of these species in this paper. The properties observed for lesser-known species are compared with twenty Indian mainstream timbers. The results have indicated that there is a need for further expanding the scope for exploring more such species so that timber requirement of the region is meted out.