Infrared spectroscopy was used to differentiate coniferous woods commonly found in mixtures in lumber producing mills in British Columbia. The method required collection of reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectra of wood samples at a 2 cm-1 resolution. From a small subset of spectra, frequencies useful for species differentiation were selected using a combination of correlation analysis and principal component analysis. The selected frequencies were used to develop methods for differentiating species using discriminant analysis. These models were then tested against the remainder of the spectra. This approach was successfully used to classify the same wood samples in freeze-dried and green conditions, but was unsuccessful in classifying extractive free samples
