What Wood? Ghana Edition: Enhancing a Wood Identification Field Manual with Smartphone Functionality

Abstract

In the late 2010s, the Timber Industry Development Division (TIDD) of the Ghana Forestry Commission sought to acquire International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) 17020:2012 accreditation. To meet the standard’s requirements, the TIDD, in cooperation with the US Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory, published a standardized wood identification field manual entitled Field Identification Manual for Ghanaian Timbers. To increase the accessibility and utility of this resource for inspectors in the field, this study transformed the printed manual into a smartphone application called What Wood? Ghana Edition. The app was built with Microsoft’s .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) framework in Visual Studio 2022 and is freely available on Android, iOS, and macOS. Ergonomic improvements over the source publication include display optimization to fit smartphone screens, adjustable font sizes, zooming and panning of images, and a colorblind mode. Automating dichotomous key-decision routing and navigation from terminal decisions to species pages has eliminated the need to manually flip pages. What Wood? Ghana Edition is also the first smartphone app with a national scope equipped with wood feature identification quizzes. As an app, the manual has increased utility and accessibility over the original publication by adding smartphone functionality while maintaining the original content and methods that fulfilled ISO/IEC accreditation requirements.

Citation

Spessert, Kyatt; Owens, Frank C.; Costa, Adriana; Ebeheakey, Alberta Asi; Wiedenhoeft, Alex C. 2025. What Wood? Ghana Edition: Enhancing a Wood Identification Field Manual with Smartphone Functionality. Forest Products Journal. 75(3): 258-270. https://doi.org/10.13073/FPJ-D-25-00022.