Comparison of the pilodyn and torsiometer methods for the rapid assessment of wood density in living trees

Two experiments were carried out to evaluate the "Pilodyn Wood Tester" (which operates by measuring the penetration of a steel striker pin) for non-destructive assessment of wood density in living trees. Results were compared with those from the recently developed Torsiometer method as regards accuracy for predicting the wood density measured from increment cores. In the first trial, 10-year-old radiata pine clones were tested (25 clones, 5 ramets/clone, 2 measurements/ramet). The Pilodyn was by far the most rapid method and the penetration data gave a correlation coefficient of —0.96 with wood density on a clone mean basis. The Torsiometer gave a correlation of 0.78. The second study was in a 31-year-old radiata pine plantation where 25 stems were assessed at four breast height sampling points by the three methods used in the first trial. Again the Pilodyn results were obtained more rapidly and were more closely related to mean tree outerwood density (r = —0.86 as compared to 0.79 for the Torsiometer). The Pilodyn Wood Tester appears to have a high potential for the rapid measurement of wood density in large numbers of stems and would be particularly useful for ranking groups of trees such as clones or families by density classes.

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