A power-driven increment borer for sampling high-density tropical wood

High-density hardwood trees with large diameters have been found to damage manually operated increment borers, thus limiting their use in the tropics. Therefore, we herein report a new, low-cost gasoline-powered sampling system for high-density tropical hardwood trees with large diameters. This system provides increment cores 15 mm in diameter and up to 1.35 m in length, allowing minimally invasive sampling of tropical hardwood tree species, which, up to the present, could not be collected by conventional 5 or 10 mm increment borers. This system provides a single core sample with ample amount of wood for multidisciplinary analyses, including ring width, stable isotope and wood anatomical measurements. The borer never gets stuck inside stems, even in hollowed trees, cores will never twist during coring, and the gasoline drill gives ample flexibility in the field. It is anticipated that the dendrochronological community will find our technique very useful in the pursuit of tropical tree ring research.