Hey wood ID wonks, think you could eyeball different species from the same genus?
The Taj Mahal of wood species anatomy laboratories is sending one of its researchers-The Guy to talk to about speciation-to the National Wood Flooring Association Certified Professionals Inspector Symposium, which this year will be held the day before the trade show starts, on April 16.
Dr. Alex Wiedenhoeft is a research botanist in the Center for Wood Anatomy Research at the federal Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis. His two seminars are "Understanding Dimensional Change Coefficients" at 10:15 a.m, and "Wood Species Identification" at 1:15 p.m.
Wiedenhoeft is the associate editor of the International Association of Wood Anatomists Journal and serves on their board of directors. He holds adjunct professorships in the forestry and natural resources department at Purdue University and UW-Madison's botany department, as well as a foreign professorship at the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Botucatu, Brazil.
Somehow he still has time to study wood usage, botanical and forensic wood anatomy (he identifies wood for everything from FBI crime scenes to plane crashes) and biocentric wood science.
In collaboration with fellow researchers, he's also developed a camera device that can identify a wood species in 30 seconds, which he'll demonstrate during the Symposium.
