Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp Morris Lake is spending his retirement writing about Australia's rainforest woods

After learning about a new method of identifying wood from its grain, Morris Lake was struck by an idea that could help regulate the world's lumber trade, as Ann Jones discovers.

Less than half a per cent of Australia’s landmass is currently covered by rainforest.

‘One large tree in a rainforest will in fact put something like 1,000 litres of water into the atmosphere—sucking it out of the soil and putting it into the atmosphere,’ says Morris Lake, author of Australian Rainforest Woods: Characteristics, Uses and Identification.

‘That’s why it rains heavily in a rainforest. The big problem is that if you remove those rainforests ... you only have one go to allow it to regenerate. If it doesn’t regenerate straight away, you will never again have rainforest there.

It’s almost impossible for somebody to pull that ship up and say, hang on, that’s an illegal log that is coming out of country x.

‘And, you know, people say, “why are there deserts?” If you take away the rainforests, then you will not get as high rainfall.’

He says that if the world’s rainforests continue being harvested at their current rate, ‘by 2025, 80 per cent of the rainforest on this planet will be harvested. That’s within my generation.’

Worldwide, taking data between the years 2000 and 2010, deforestation affected an estimated 13 million hectares per year through both human and natural causes, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp A macro photo of Nauclea orientalis (cheesewood) from the family Rubiaceae.

Clearing the forest and planting crops such as palm oil is a huge contributor to the worldwide loss of rainforest footprint. Such clearing is thought to instigate a loss of 60 per cent of biodiversity in logged areas of SE Asia.

The felled timber from these areas can be sold on and exported for extra profit, and there is a worldwide market for all sorts of timbers.

‘There’s been a change throughout the world,’ Lake says.

‘China is now the largest manufacturing country in the world. And they need timber to manufacture now 40 per cent of the western world’s furniture.

‘When China had the big floods in 1998, in the year 2000 they suddenly decided that they would stop logging all together in China.

‘At that time, they were importing four-and-a-half million cubic metres of timber a year. In 2009 that had increased to 45 million cubic metres of timber. I don’t know what it is now, but it must be close to 60 million cubic metres. And unfortunately we can’t control that.

‘It’s supply and demand—we live in this supply and demand world.’

One of the problems in the trade of lumber is that it is almost impossible to identify wood once it is cut, as identification relies on botanical features of trees—the bark and leaves, which are stripped off the tree.

Transhipping can take place, further complicating the obvious provenance of the logs.

‘It’s almost impossible for somebody to pull that ship up and say, hang on, that’s an illegal log that is coming out of country x,’ Lake says.

Lake is pushing for changes to the identification process of wood, partially because of a new preparation and photography technique developed by retired French orthodontist Jean-Claude Cerre, who Lake made friends with at an overseas conference.

‘Part of the process is that they use a microtome, which is used in medical terms to actually cut slices of tissues. And the problem with wood is that it’s very hard, and if you get very, very hard wood, you probably have to boil that timber using all sorts of chemicals for a few days so you can get it so you can take a slice,’ says Lake.

Normal saws and sand paper were not used as they marked the cuts, and the saw dust caused visibility issues on a microscopic level.

But Cerre took umbrage at suggestions that he’d never be able to get a clean cut, and after experimentation has come up with a method that produces clear colour photos of the end grain on a macro level.

The resulting photos of woody cross sections show the structure of the wood with clarity, so clear that you can see through some of the vessels.

And looking at it, Morris Lake was struck by an idea for identification. Why wouldn’t pattern recognition software be able to use the unique tissue structure of each species of tree?

Lake hopes that an international database of macro photos will be able to be constructed and that computer algorithms will be used in order to identify the provenance of a log even after all its botanical information is stripped.

This could be used as a tool to identify illegal logs, or even if the furniture you are buying was built using trees cleared for palm oil production.

Morris Lake will present his idea on pattern recognition and an international database of wood end grain cuts to the joint meeting of the International Wood Collectors Society and the International Association of Wood Anatomists at Penn State University in July this year.

Australia's extraordinary rainforest woods Listen to Morris Lake tell Off Track about all that we have to thank gymnosperms for.

Listen to a new outdoor adventure every week with Off Track.

