GAO-06-624 Wood Utilization: Federal Research and Product Development Activities, Support, and Technology Transfer

Wood utilisation research and product development spans a broad spectrum of activities. These activities fall into five categories: harvesting, wood properties, manufacturing and processing, products and testing, and economics and marketing. This book deals with the US federal input in this field.

The connections between communities and forests are complex and evolving, presenting challenges to forest managers, researchers, and communities themselves. Dependency on timber extraction and timber-related industries is no longer a universal characteristic of the forest community. Remoteness is also a less common feature, as technology, workforce mobility, tourism, and 'amenity migrants' increasingly connect rural to urban places. Forest Community Connections explores the responses of forest communities to a changing economy, changing federal policy, and concerns about forest health from both within and outside forest communities. Focusing primarily on the United States, the book examines the ways that social scientists work with communities-their role in facilitating social learning, informing policy decisions, and contributing to community well being. Bringing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, political science, and forestry, the authors review a range of management issues, including wildfire risk, forest restoration, labor force capacity, and the growing demand for a growing variety of forest goods and services. They examine the increasingly diverse aesthetic and cultural values that forest residents attribute to forests, the factors that contribute to strong and resilient connections between communities and forests, and consider a range of governance structures to positively influence the well being of forest communities and forests, including collaboration and community-based forestry.

The intent of this review is to obtain a better understanding of the nature of technology transfer, especially as such involves wood utilization research and development. More pointedly, the review seeks to gain a better understanding of the (1) conceptual frameworks explaining technology transfer and the factors that such frameworks suggest as important to the use of knowledge provided by research, (2) public and private organizations that sponsor efforts to transfer technologies provided by research, and (3) conditions necessary for the effective transfer of technologies provided by research, especially those conditions called to mind by experienced researchers and research program managers.

This atlas presents technical information for professionals who process and use temperate or tropical timber. It combines the main technical characteristics of 283 tropical species and 17 species from temperate regions most commonly used in Europe with their primary uses.