The Atlas
Three different regimes get collapsed into one word — CITES — in most guitar conversations, and they are not the same thing. This page separates them, and says what each one actually reaches when the object in question is a finished guitar rather than a stack of timber.
It is not legal advice, and it says nothing about any particular instrument. What we can say is narrower and checkable: this species carries this status, as of this date, and here is the document we read.
Regulatory copy last reviewed 9 August 2026. This page is hand-maintained and its subject moves on someone else’s schedule; the species statuses below carry their own verification date.
One
Read across a row rather than down a column. These are not three levels of the same rule — they are three separate instruments asking three unrelated questions, and a wood can be caught by one and untouched by the others.
| CITESConvention on international trade | The Lacey ActUnited States | EUDREuropean Union | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The question it asks | Is this species traded across borders in a way that threatens it? | Was this plant taken, possessed, transported or sold in violation of some other law — any state law or any foreign law that protects plants? | Was this commodity grown on land deforested after 31 December 2020? |
| What triggers it | The species appears on an Appendix. | Any underlying legal violation. There is no CITES predicate in the prohibition at all. | Placing a listed commodity on the EU market, or exporting it from the Union. |
| What it covers | Only the article types the listing’s numbered annotation designates — which for most guitar woods does not include a finished instrument. | Broad. The separate import declaration — species, country of harvest, value, quantity — is phased in by tariff code. | The commodities and derived products named in the regulation’s Annex I. |
| Who it binds | Whoever moves a specimen across an international border. | The importer of record. | EU operators and traders. |
| Where it stands | CoP20 amendments in force 5 March 2026. | Phase VII of the declaration schedule effective 1 December 2024. | Applies from 30 December 2026; 30 June 2027 for natural persons and micro or small undertakings. |
| Worth knowing | CoP20 met in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, 24 November to 5 December 2025; its amendments took effect ninety days after it closed. | CITES status does bear on Lacey, but in the opposite direction to the one people expect: it removes exemptions. The common-cultivar and common-food-crop exclusions do not apply to a plant listed in a CITES appendix. Filing has also changed — since the start of 2026 the declaration goes through ACE or LAWGS rather than the paper PPQ Form 505. | Those dates are the ones set by Regulation (EU) 2025/2650. EUDR has been postponed twice, and older sources — including some official summary pages — still carry superseded dates. It is the most likely thing on this page to go stale, which is why the review date is at the top. |
Two
An Appendix-II timber listing is almost never “the whole tree and everything made of it”. Each listing carries a numbered annotation saying which article types it reaches, and for most guitar woods a finished instrument sits outside that list even though the species is squarely inside the appendix.
Six annotations do essentially all the work for guitar woods. The descriptions below are our summaries of them, abridged, taken from the Annex to Commission Regulation (EU) 2026/1383 — notes on interpretation, point 12. The regulation’s own text governs, and the exceptions it lists are longer than the room here.
| Annotation | What it designates | A finished instrument? |
|---|---|---|
| #4 | All parts and derivatives, with narrow exceptions — seeds, in-vitro cultures, cut flowers, certain fruits and stems, retail-packaged finished products of two named succulents, and cosmetics. No timber exception and no musical-instrument exception. | Inside — regulated |
| #5 | Logs, sawn wood and veneer sheets. | Outside |
| #6 | Logs, sawn wood, veneer sheets and plywood. | Outside |
| #10 | All parts and derivatives, except finished musical instruments, parts and accessories for non-commercial trade only — performance, personal use, display, loan, competition, teaching, appraisal or repair, without a change of ownership. A zero quota applies to wild-harvested specimens traded commercially. As amended at CoP20, in force 5 March 2026. | Partly — see the text |
| #15 | All parts and derivatives, except leaves, flowers, pollen, fruits and seeds; finished products up to 10 kg of the listed wood per shipment; and finished musical instruments, parts and accessories. Two carve-outs redirect elsewhere: Dalbergia cochinchinensis to #4, and Dalbergia of Mexican origin to #6. | Outside |
| #17 | Logs, sawn wood, veneer sheets, plywood and transformed wood — continuously shaped stock. | Outside |
All Dalbergia — the rosewoods — entered CITES Appendix II on 2 January 2017. Almost three years later, on 26 November 2019, annotation #15 was amended to put finished musical instruments, their parts and their accessories outside it. The species is still listed. What changed is that the listing stopped reaching the finished guitar.
26 November 2019 is the CITES date. The EU’s own transposition entered into force on 14 December 2019 — an eighteen-day window, irrelevant to any guitar sold today, but the two dates belong to two different instruments and should not be swapped for one another.
The 2019 amendment was widely reported as the end of the rosewood restrictions. It was not. Dalbergia remains in Appendix II, and rosewood as timber — sets, billets, back-and-side blanks — is regulated exactly as it was in 2017. Only the finished instrument steps outside the annotation.
And it does not step outside for Brazilian rosewood. Dalbergia nigra has been in Appendix I since 11 June 1992 — a stricter regime that the 2019 amendment does not touch and that does reach manufactured and finished products. Pre-Convention material is handled separately, with its own documentation. If a guitar is described as Brazilian rosewood, that is a paperwork question to put to the dealer, not a settled one.
Two different things can leave the question open, and they are worth telling apart because the follow-up question to the dealer is different in each case.
Several listings reach named populations only, so the same botanical species is listed from one region and unlisted from another. Ask about origin.
One trade word, more than one botanical answer — sometimes with different annotations behind them. Ask what the species is.
These are the places an automated “is this genus in the appendices” lookup returns the wrong answer, and they are worth naming because that lookup is what most tools do.
The EU maintains its own Annex D, a monitoring annex with no CITES standing: no CITES permit, no CoP proposal behind it. Several woods a guitarist will recognise sit there — Entandrophragma, which is sapele’s genus, among them. A species on Annex D is not CITES-listed, and anyone describing it that way, including us, would be wrong.
Three
We record a CITES status for every one of the 88 species in the index, including the ones that are not listed — because an absent badge must never quietly mean “we didn’t check”. 62 are verified absent from Appendices I, II and III. The other 26 are below, and each name opens that wood on the Wood Key, where the status, its date and the document behind it sit together.
Statuses verified 2026-08-09, and that is the date we checked — not the date any listing took effect. 87 of the 88 were read from Commission Regulation (EU) 2026/1383, cross-checked against the USDA APHIS CITES Timber Species Manual; one from US FWS Public Bulletin PB-26-001. These are official reproductions of the CITES text, not the Convention’s own text — see below.
African BlackwoodAmazon RosewoodBois de RoseBubingaCocoboloCuban MahoganyEast Indian RosewoodGuatemalan RosewoodHonduran RosewoodMadagascar RosewoodNicaraguan RosewoodPalo EscritoPanama RosewoodPernambuco
African MahoganyBrazilian MahoganyHonduran MahoganyPeruvian MahoganySouth American Mahogany
Asian RosewoodEbonyGranadilloMahoganyPadaukRosewood (unspecified)
Four
FSC certification is voluntary and market-based. It is not law, and it does not discharge a Lacey obligation or an EUDR one — a certificate answers a different question from either. Certification is audited by third-party accredited bodies against FSC’s own principles.
The labels are also not interchangeable, and the last one is the one people read too generously. FSC 100% is all material from FSC-certified forests. FSC Recycled is entirely recycled material. FSC Mix is a mixture of certified, recycled and Controlled Wood. And FSC Controlled Wood is not from certified forests at all — it is a risk-screening standard that excludes five categories of unacceptable source, used as an input to Mix.
There is no FSC scheme specific to musical instruments or to small-shop luthiery. Certified guitars are described under general project certification.
Provenance is an ethical-sourcing story as much as a tonal one, and it is a wood question rather than a regulatory one — so it lives on the Wood Key, where the provenance axis is set out in full. Plate VI →
Five
This is not legal advice. We do not say whether a particular instrument can cross a particular border, and we have not seen any individual guitar’s paperwork. What we say is narrower and checkable: this species carries this status, as of this date, and here is the document we read. Ask the dealer about documentation.
We have not read the CITES Secretariat’s own text. Its site refuses our requests and the Species+ database renders in a way we cannot read, so everything above rests on two official reproductions of the Convention’s appendices that agree with each other on every point we checked, plus one US bulletin. That is a real limitation and it is the reason this page never describes its material as coming from the appendices themselves.
The documents behind this page:
Corrections are genuinely welcome, and on this page more than any other: hello@tonewoodatlas.com.
Regulatory copy last reviewed 9 August 2026. Species statuses are read from the index at render time and carry their own verification date, above.
