Résumé
Gabon is a Central African country with vast forested areas representing 80% of its territory (Ikogou et al 2016) with more than 600 tree species (Arrêté 2004) of a diversity that would benefit from being developed. In these forests, tree species have different degrees of shade tolerance. It is therefore possible to group them into different classes, such as very sun-loving and pioneer tree species, shade-tolerant species or even intermediate temperaments with so-called hemi-tolerant species. Unfortunately, there is a significant lack of scientific information on the technical characteristics of the wood of many of these species, such as their dimensional stability, which is an important property for their value. Dimensional stability refers to the ability of wood to retain its dimensions when exposed to variations in temperature and/or humidity. As wood is an anisotropic material, a species is considered to be stable when its dimensional variations are very small, i.e. when the anisotropy, which is the ratio between tangential shrinkage and radial shrinkage, is close to 1. The aim of this study is to relate the dimensional stability of the wood of 25 tropical hardwood species to their temperament in relation to light.