This data set provides the basic wood density values for 156 tree species obtained from 110605 increment cores (one core per tree) sampled during four consecutive years (2016-2019) by the French NFI within the XyloDensMap project (Leban et al., 2016, 2020). Two different types of increment cores were sampled. • The AGE cores (from the bark to the pith) were sampled for the measurement of the annual increments of the last five rings and of the age of the dominant trees of each NFI plot. • The EXTERNAL cores (average length of 6 cm) were sampled for the measurement of the annual increments of the last five rings. At INRAE, we measured a wood density profile all along each core, one measurement each 0.625 mm (Jacquin et al., 2019). We then calculated for each tree the arithmetic mean of the BASIC DENSITY (BD). For each species, all the cores (AGE & INCREMENT) were grouped together for computing the arithmetic mean of basic density and the standard deviation. For each species, we provide in this file, BD, the wood basic density (kg/m3); SD-BD, the standard deviation (kg/m3), the number of cores per species as well as the volumetric shrinkage. This data set is used in the publications describing the wood properties of the 21 most important tree forest species in France (e.g., Leban et al., 2022 for sessile oak) and can be used for forest carbon accounting. English (2022-04-11)