ESTIMATION ON VOLUME-WEIGHTED AVERAGE WOOD DENSITY OF MALAYSIAN TIMBER FOR CALCULATION OF CARBON STOCK

Abstract

Wood density plays an important role in the calculation of national carbon stock, specifically when employing production approach to observe the carbon stock change based on national production of harvested wood products. Density is used as one of the parameter for estimating the carbon stock and annual carbon change in the harvested wood products pools. In this study, the commodity data, sawn timber productions from year 1995 to 2020, were gathered from published annual statistics by Forestry Statistics Peninsular Malaysia. These data include all the commercial timbers in Peninsular Malaysia, which are grouped according to trade names. Efforts were made to correctly identify and compile the botanical name as well as density range and mean of each timber trade name according to published references. Basic density and total volume of sawn timber productions were used to calculate the weighted average wood density of Malaysian timber. The estimated volume-weighted average wood density (563 kg m^-3) was comparable to the arithmetic mean (559 kg m^-3) and published density value for tropical species (590 kg m^-3) by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2006.