| A year has passed since the first Special Issue on Wood and Wood Products appeared in the Journal of Near Infrared Spectroscopy. Much has happened in that time as is evidenced by the similarly large number of papers presented in this issue.
A highlight of the second Special Issue is the most definitive review to date of NIR band assignments for wood. Manfred Schwanninger, Jose Carlos de Rodrigues and Karin Fackler have prepared a comprehensive paper, which will no doubt be referred to often in the future by both older and younger generations of wood NIR spectroscopists.
Jakub and Anna Sandak have two papers in this issue: one focuses on biomass characterisation, particularly for characterising feedstock for bio-economy products, while the second presents results of biodegradation of reconstituted wood products and cereal fibre. The application of NIR to biodegradation is further examined by Fackler and Schwanninger who used deuterium oxide to examine the accessibility of hydroxyl groups into decayed wood and Jones et al. who present results on the decay prediction of coast redwood. The detailed analysis of lignin gets considerable attention in this issue with three papers specifically characterising lignin content including the quantitation of the syringyl/guaiacyl ratio by Alves et al.
In the last Special Issue we raised the question as to why, when NIR of wood has been an active field of research for 20 or more years, is it that NIR is still struggling to gain acceptance in the mainstream of wood characterisation. That may be changing with portable applications being more available and reliable. Meder et al. show that the newer generation of portable NIR systems provide a truly competitive option to laboratory systems for the determination of Kraft pulp yield, while Mora et al. use NIR on merchantable loblolly pine logs to determine basic density and moisture content. Given the ever increasing body of evidence that these two Special Issues now provide, and the ever increasing rate of application in the forestry and forest products sector, it is time that NIR was afforded serious attention as a means to characterise the forest resource and assess end-use potential and end-use performance of wood products.
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