WinCELL

WinCELL is an image analysis software program specifically designed for wood cells analysis. It can quantify the changes in wood structure over annual rings.

WinCELL measures wood cell morphology on thin wood slices cut with a microtome or, for larger cells like earlywood vessels of deciduous species, directly on wood surfaces*. Wood cells morphological data can be measured per annual ring.

Image analysers not made specifically for wood cells measurement are not usually able to produce data suited for dendrochronology studies. These systems lack some knowledge about annual tree rings formation and the structure of their cells (to compute the ring width for example). WinCELL has this kind of know-how built-in. It knows, for example, that a wall between two adjacent cells must be split in two to compute the cells length and earlywood or ring width. Its versatile settings allow to analyse different wood species (vessels of deciduous and radial row of conifer tracheids). It supports different automatic and interactive analysis modes. The latter allows you to select rows of cells to analyse them in a way that mimics the traditional trachedoid** method. WinCELL handles incomplete cells, those truncated by image boundary, so that they have no effects on the average cell measurements.