| # CITES wood ID: descriptions, illustrations, identification, and information retrieval |

H.G. Richter, K. Gembruch, G. Koch

### Comments and acknowledgements

The project CITES wood ID was inspired and initiated by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN – www.bfn.de) of the Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation and Reactor Safety (BMU). We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support on behalf of the Federal Agency. We also wish to express our thanks to the BfN co-ordinator, Mr. H.J. Schmitz-Kretschmer, for his keen interest in the subject and his favourable disposition of sharing information and giving advice in technical and administrative matters.

The characters used in the database for the macroscopic description and the accompanying explanations have been largely adopted from macro HOLZ data (Richter, Oelker & Krämer 2002 onwards) with a few modifications whenever required.

After very careful preparation of the wood specimens by the authors, the digital photo macrographs illustrating the characters as well as the timbers coded in CITES wood ID were taken and pre-processed by Ms. Christina Waitkus, chief photographer of the Thünen-Institut www.thuenen.de. To her expertise and generous support we owe the numerous high-quality colour illustrations which are now part of the database. We are also very grateful to Marlis Reich und Dr. Pierre Détienne for their support when the need arose to create a French language version of the CITES wood ID database.

All coded wood descriptions in the database are based on reference specimens of the scientific wood collection (RBHw) of Thünen-Institut for Wood Research, Hamburg. Additional important sources of bibliographical information are listed in the references.

We greatly acknowledge the permission by the International Association of Wood Anatomists (IAWA - www.iawa-website.org) to partially adopt some of the character notes elaborated by international committees for hardwoods (IAWA 1989) and softwoods (IAWA 2004).

We thank Dr Mike Dallwitz for computing support.

Contents