WSGDI: A database of wood specific gravity for Indian forests.

Wood specific gravity (WSG) is an important component in biomass estimation through non-destructive allometric approach. However, a number of factors like climatic condition, soil, disturbance, management practice, geographic location etc. have huge impact on WSG variation. The present data set provides a collective WSG data for different species (333) consisting of 711 individuals procured from already published research paper for 11 forest groups of India occurring in different climatic and edaphic conditions. It also includes WSG data of a number of juvenile tree species for tropical dry deciduous forest. A number of studies in India have not considered WSG value in biomass estimation of juvenile trees. However, previous reports of Chaturvedi et al. (2012) suggested that the use of WSG in biomass estimation provide better result than using only the diameter and height as variables. It also includes samples/ species column for getting information about the number of samples considered for WSG determination. Especially this data set will be helpful to get WSG data on the basis of similar climatic condition, forest group according to the need of the future studies and this may minimize the source of WSG variation which would ultimately minimize variation in biomass and carbon estimation. It will also help to provide WSG data for allometric model development. Also it will be help to study the physical property (strength) of wood. Further, use of this database will save the time of workers as it is easily assessable and it provides WSG value of a number of species at one place.