Inventory of wood specific gravity for Indian forests

• Wood specific gravity is an important factor for minimizing errors in biomass estimates. • It shows a wide inter-and intra-specific variation across forest groups. • Tropical dry deciduous forest had the widest range of distribution for wood specific gravity. • Adult individuals of a species have higher wood specific gravity value than younger ones. • Present dataset on wood specific gravity would be of great importance for future works. Wood specific gravity (WSG) is one of the most important functional traits of plants that helps in minimizing the variability of biomass estimates generated due to the inter-specific and intra-specific variations. Assemblage of an integrated inventory of WSG for various species from different forest groups, vegetation types is expected to provide crucial insights in the problems related to biomass estimation and serve as a standard reference for ecological research particularly on carbon dynamics and functional studies by providing vegetational specific WSG values for a number of species at one place. Survey of literature for WSG in Indian forest communities showed that WSG values of 879 individuals belonging to 351 species, 221 genus and 77 families are available for eleven forest groups of India. Result showed that species present in a particular forest group and climatic condition showed a different value for WSG than the similar species present in other forest types and climatic conditions. It also showed that Eugenia utilis has the highest WSG (0.98) for Indian forests and it was lowest for Dalbergia sissoo (0.05). Further, we observed that in case of mature individuals, WSG value of maximum number of species was found between 0.61 to 0.80 whereas, for juvenile individuals, it was maximum between 0.41 to 0.60 indicating the role of tree diameter in WSG. In addition, we observed that tropical dry deciduous forest had the widest range of distribution for WSG. Moreover, the WSG value of species in hilly terrains showed variation with similar species present in tropical and subtropical areas. The present dataset also showed that highest WSG value was found for species present in tropical wet evergreen forest while lowest was found for tropical dry deciduous forest indicating the effect of precipitation in increasing WSG. The present dataset would of great importance for future studies particularly focusing on biomass estimation and functional trait by providing WSG values for a large number of species.