Abstract
Wood microdensitometry provides an integrated measurement of inter and intra-annual changes in wood anatomy and lignification. Although it can be acquired through a wide array of techniques, X-ray-based techniques are still the standard. Conversion of a grayscale X-ray image to density and annual ring boundaries delimitation is performed through image analysis software. Proprietary software has dominated these applications, albeit Free Open Source Software (FOSS) has been developed recently. We present ρ-MtreeRing, a user-friendly FOSS that streamlines the entire microdensitometry analysis process through a graphical user interface based on Shiny R Software without any programming knowledge. We compared the results of this program with the most widely used commercial software (WinDendro), showing the validity of the results. ρ-MtreeRing can be personalized and developed by the microdensitometry research community.
Highlights
Xylem cell formation involves sequential processes of cell division, expansion and lignification [1]
This kind of information associated with the specimen origin is, as an afterthought, compiled with the Sample Info required for the density analysis
All these values can be exported in a Comma Separated Values (CSV) format file or in Excel (XLSX)
Summary
Xylem cell formation involves sequential processes of cell division, expansion and lignification [1]. The dynamics of these processes are affected by intrinsic and environmental factors leading to differences in xylem structure. Dendrochronology aims at extracting this environmental information from annual ring features. Ring width data basically depends on the cell division process with a minor expansion effect [2]. Wood quantitative anatomy is more effective since it can isolate information from the different xylem development phases, with the ability to extract intra-annual variability [3]. Despite ongoing improvements in lab and computer techniques [4,5], xylem quantitative anatomy is still highly work intensive, and does not capture lignification processes, in the complex xylem of angiosperms [6,7]
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