Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Owens, Frank

Committee Member

Costa, Adriana

Committee Member

Wiedenhoeft, Alex

Committee Member

Shmulsky, Rubin

Date of Degree

8-7-2025

Original embargo terms

Visible MSU Only 2 Years

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Campus Access Only

Major

Sustainable Bioproducts

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Forest Resources

Department

Department of Sustainable Bioproducts

Abstract

International collaborations between the U.S. Forest Service and government agencies in West Africa and Latin America led to the authoring of two wood identification field manuals: one for Ghana and the other for the regions of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. In use, the print and PDF versions of these publications pose numerous ergonomic challenges in the field. To address these challenges and increase the availability, accessibility, and utility of the manuals’ content, members of Mississippi State University’s Wood Identification Team collaborated with the Center for Wood Anatomy Research at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory to transform the original publications into smartphone applications with enhanced functionality. Built with the .NET MAUI framework in Visual Studio 2022, the two WhatWood? apps provide automatic text and image sizing, zooming and panning of images, adjustable font sizes, one-handed operation, a colorblind mode, automatic dichotomous key decision routing, and interactive anatomical feature quizzes.

Sponsorship (Optional)

National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), U.S. Department of Agriculture, McIntire Stennis project under accession number 7004014

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