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Résumé :
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Wood fibre research has been a central activity at CSIRO Forestry and Forest Products for several decades. Many of the questions asked today are essentially the same as those asked 40 years ago: What are the key wood fibre properties influencing the properties of pulp, paper and wood products? What is the natural variation of each of these properties? How can we include wood fibre quality traits in tree improvement programmes? The ability to obtain sufficient fibre property data limits the testing of hypotheses. Technology has now largely removed those limitations, and the problem of data overload exist. In the last decade, systems that automatically acquire huge quantities of fibre property data from small wood samples are developed. SilviScan combines x-ray diffractometry, x-ray densitometry and image analysis to produce several gigabytes of fibre property data each day in the form of images, tables and lists. The data is reduced to forms that allow rapid comprehension at many levels of detail, and then most of it is discarded. The wood sample itself is filed away as the most compact and durable storage medium. In parallel with the development of SilviScan, the field of informatics has been rapidly evolving. Informatics is the generation, management and communication of information. It encompasses much of science and technology and even includes aspects of philosophy and art. In this context, art and science form synergistic partnerships, improving our ability to comprehend relationships in complex data sets through techniques of scientific visualization. The development of SilviScan has been a journey through the field of informatics - including theory, design, data acquisition, storage, reduction, visualization, interpretation and communication. In this presentation, the aspects of this journey are described.
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