7 Teakwood Chemistry and Natural Durability Florence Bobelé Niamké, Nadine Amusant, Adima Amissa Augustin, and Gilles Chaix Abstract The intraspecific variability of teakwood gen- erates different responses with industrialists in the timber and wood business. Several quality parameters are commonly employed when evaluating teakwood, although these factors are very intriguing, they do not account for all aspects of wood quality. In the present chapter, we review the normalized methods of evaluating technological properties of teak- wood and also include chemical composition as an important criterion. The latter has been found to play a key role as it impacts the most important technological properties such as color and natural durability at different stages of teakwood production from plantation to usage. Therefore, it is important to include chemical composition of teak as a factor in determining its quality, and non-destructive tools like NIR (Near-infrared) spectroscopy for wood phenotyping. 7.1 Introduction Teak is native to South-East Asia (Keogh 2001) and is one of the most valuable tropical (Latin and South America, Africa, Oceania) hardwoods found in the international timber market. Its wood quality and resistance to wildfires, favored its widespread cultivation in several tropical countries (Bhat and Ma 2004) and made it one of the most planted forest species in the world (Pandey and Brown 2000). It is considered to be one of the well-adapted exotic species. Natural teak forests covered 29 million ha in 2010 (Kollert and Cherubini 2012) whereas the area covered by teak plantations was estimated at 4.35–6.89 million ha (Bhat and Ma 2004; FAO 2009). Teakwood is widely used for its texture and aesthetics and especially for its technological properties such as shrinkage, natural durability and color. It is one of the most sought-after tropical hardwoods in luxury markets and has various industrial uses including manufacturing of furniture items. Teakwood has an excellent reputation for its unique qualities and durability F. B. Niamké (&) Á A. A. Augustin Institut National Polytechnique Félix Houphouët Boigny, BP 1093, Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast e-mail: bobele.niamke@inphb.ci A. A. Augustin e-mail: amissa.adima@inphb.ci N. Amusant CIRAD ES Department, UMR Ecofog, BP 701, 97310 Kourou cedex, France e-mail: nadine.amusant@cirad.fr G. Chaix CIRAD, UMR AGAP Institut, 34398 Montpellier, France G. Chaix UMR AGAP Institut, Univ Montpellier, CIRAD, INRAE, Institut Agro, 34398 Montpellier, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Ramasamy et al. (eds.), The Teak Genome, Compendium of Plant Genomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79311-1_7 83