It seems to the Inquiry that for much of its history the native forest sawn timber industry has been in disequilibrium with the supply of its raw material. In most years there seem to have been too many mills for the timber on offer. Milling capacity has almost always been greater than the supply of logs to the mills. Individual mills dependent on native forest, and the groups of such mills tha...

E ective forest management is crucial to maximising the economic bene ts obtained from forests. However, the arrival of novel pests and pathogens may have a negative e ect on timber values. We argue that management strategies should be calibrated to consider the e ect of disease and in this paper explore the optimal rotation length of a single rotation, even-aged, plantation forest under varyin...

Although the benefits of using timber in midand high-rise construction are undisputed, there are perceived shortcomings with respect to the ductility needed to provide seismic resistance and a corresponding lack of appropriate design guidance. Overcoming these perceived shortcomings will allow timber, and its wood product derivatives, to further expand into the multi-storey construction sector,...

Most researchers defend cocoa agroforests as a model, which guarantees sustainable cocoa production while protecting biodiversity. However, in most countries, farmers' strategies favour "full sun" cocoa farms, close to the concept of monoculture. Why this apparent paradox? Field surveys were conducted in 2005 and 2008 with 180 migrant and autochthon farmers in four districts of Ghana, including...

Catastrophic shocks to existing stocks of a renewable resource can cause long-run price shifts. With timber, these long-run price shifts may be accompanied by a short-run price drop due to salvage. Hurricane Hugo damaged 20% of southern pine timber in the South Carolina Coastal Plain in 1989. To estimate the shortand long-run effects of the hurricane on the prices of timber stocks, we estimated...

The vibration serviceability of flooring structures has been of concern for decades. To date, design criteria classifying the dynamic behaviour of different types of timber flooring structures to an acceptable degree have not been well established. Parameters commonly used to investigate and assess vibrational performances of timber floors include natural frequencies, damping ratios, dynamic di...

The economic concepts of imperfect markets and incomplete information are examined, in the context of the market for smallholder timber in Leyte Province in the Philippines. A strategy is advanced to carry out timber market research, which involves identification of the supply chain and stakeholder groups in the Leyte timber market, snowball sampling to identify initial market agents, making co...

An X-ray computed-tomographic examination of nest-gallery development from timbers naturally infested by foraging groups of Incisitermes minor colonies was conducted. This study documents the colonization process of I. minor to new timbers and how the isolated groups maintain their nest-gallery system. The results suggested that development of a nest-gallery within a suitable wood item is not r...

Timber harvesting from the tropical rainforests of north Queensland ceased following their inscription on the World Heritage List in 1988. The cessation of logging was due to a political ban, not due to exhaustion of the resources. There is no evidence to suggest that logging could not be sustained. Rather, there are growing evidences to suggest that the polycyclic selection system could have s...