After Hurricane Maria made landfall in September 2017, the storm left hundreds of thousands of downed trees in its wake. Many of the trees were species with commercially valuable wood, but which ones?

To find out, an assessment of the post-hurricane wood, stored at 21 different locations around the island, was requested by Puerto Rico’s Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, or DNER. The Federal Emergency Management Agency supported this request through the Natural and Cultural Resources Recovery Support Function.  The Department of the Interior contacted the USDA Forest Service, and scientists Mike Wiemann of the Forest Products Laboratory and William Gould from the International Institute of Tropical Forestry developed an assessment of the species mix and log quality of the downed trees.