With the adoption of a number of anti-illegal logging laws, treaties, memoranda, and international agreements around the world, there is broad and renewed interest in wood identification, especially in the field at the macroscopic level. In response to this interest, and to begin to fill an obvious gap in the corpus of wood anatomical reference material, we review several prominent English-language publications on macroscopic wood identification in order to form a list of characters. We compile characters and organize them in the spirit of the IAWA lists for hardwood and softwood microscopic identification, present the state of the art as it exists, attempt to reconcile the different sets of definitions, characters, and character states, then present our proposed working-list. It is our intent with this publication to open an international discussion regarding the standardization of macroscopic wood identification features, and it is our hope that such a discussion can include critical works from the non-English literature. We also call for an illustrated glossary to accompany the proposed list. A standard lexicon to describe wood at the macroscopic level will simplify the preparation of identification documents and permit the ready translation of keys and other references for easy use and deployment around the world.

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Species identification is a crucial step in the study of wooden artefacts, but sampling is frequently impossible. The objective of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of reflected light microscopy, including the use of polarising and narrow-band blue filters, as a non-invasive identification tool. Different surfacing and finishing techniques copying historical manufacturing methods were applied to selected species. The visibility of anatomical features was evaluated on the basis of a four level scale. Two indexes were created: an Identifiable Anatomical Features index (IAF) to evaluate the effect of treatments on the complex of microstructural characters, and a Feature Recognition Index (FRI) to estimate the susceptibility of each anatomical feature towards different treatments. Surfacing affected the visibility of anatomical features to different degrees of severity depending both on the technique used and on the species. The visibility could be partially improved or decreased by the presence of finishes, depending on their transparency. Each anatomical feature showed different susceptibilities towards treatments. Both polarising and narrow-band blue filters considerably increased visibility of several anatomical features. Possibilities to recognise individual character states were encouraging, except when obscured by low transparency finishes. Much diagnostic anatomical information can be obtained by the use of non-invasive, reflected light microscopy, although the step from feature recognition to species identification may still require further analysis.

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