Patterns of within-stem variations in wood specific gravity and water content for five temperate tree species

Table 5 Synthesis of the results obtained for our five temperate tree species. The main theories/models/patterns from the literature are reviewed and assessed with our sample: “Yes” means that our data are in agreement with the theory for the specified case and “No” means that they are not

Species	Measurements			Theories
	Mean inner BSG	Radial variations of BSG		Successional status¹	Radial variations of BSG and BSG			BSG and successional status²
					Woodcock and Shier (2002)³	Plourde et al. (2015)⁴	Lachenbruch et al. (2011)⁵
		a⁶	b⁷
Fagus sylvatica	0.566	↗	↘	No⁸	No	–	Yes⁸	Yes
Acer pseudoplatanus	0.454	↗	↗	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Quercus petraea/robur	0.620	↘	↘	No	Yes	–	No	No^h
Abies alba	0.396	↘	↗	Yes⁸	No	No⁸	No⁸	No
Pseudotsuga menziesii	0.406	↗	↗	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes

¹ Among others: Woodcock and Shier (2002), Osunkoya et al. (2007), Schüller et al. (2013), Plourde et al. (2015)
² Among others: Woodcock and Shier (2002), Poorter (2008)
³ Threshold of initial BSG at 0.55 for hardwood species and 0.4 for softwood species
⁴ Radial increase for B S G < 0.5 and radial decrease for B S G > 0.7
⁵ Lower BSG in the corewood than in the outerwood. In the event that the 2-cm wide innerwood is removed, does it still make sense to talk about corewood?
⁶ Considering only innerwood (2-cm wide area around the pith) and outerwood (2-cm wide area at the periphery of the stem) as defined by Woodcock and Shier (2002)
⁷ After removing the innerwood
⁸ After removing the innerwood, the result is reversed

ISSN: 1297-966X