Woodfinder is an excellent website that is dedicated to advertising exotic wood dealers. In your search for Dalmata, this can be an invaluable resource provided you use multiple search terms to capture all the possible listings. I can’t speak to the quality of any of the listed dealers, but Woodfinder does have the advantage of allowing searches to be performed based on location which might allow an interested buyer to visit a listed wood dealer in person to hand pick pieces at a comfortable price.
A significant problem with using Woodfinder is that many vendors are listed for woods that, upon further investigation, they do not offer. I don’t know if perhaps once they did and they didn’t update their listings or if some vendors use a standardized list of woods that include most everything conceivable with the idea that once you land on their page you will find something you want to buy even if you didn’t know it beforehand. I end up buying stuff that way all the time.
In the case of Dalmata, Woodfinder worked perfectly. A search returns only one known vendor: West Penn Hardwoods.
Uses
As is often the case with exotic and expensive tropical hardwoods that are difficult to work and only available in relatively small sizes, the uses of Dalmata are predictably limited. The most common applications of Dalmata are in turned objects such as bowls, pens, and lidded boxes; inlaid boxes such as jewelry boxes; and knife handles. Other small specialty items may be made of Dalmata; for example, I have seen rings carved from Dalmata for sale.
Sustainability
Dalmata is not listed as being in any way threatened or endangered by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Appendices nor does it appear on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.
Dalmata is not subject to special restrictions by any United States government agency.
The fact that Dalmata is not listed by a conservation agency or restricted by any government agency does not necessarily mean that it is in good supply. It could simply mean that the wood is uncommon outside of its native area, is a relative newcomer to the tropical lumber markets and that its actual conservation status is unknown. Dalmata in particular is a wood that is very new to the markets of the United States with most all of it coming from Peru, a nation that is in the beginning stages of exploiting its Amazonian timber stocks with little to no oversight from conservation agencies or even from the Peruvian government itself, which is rife with corruption and lax application of what environmental legislation does exist.
I realize that inherent in working with wood is the killing of a part of the natural world that may be slow to return and if I become deeply concerned about this fact, I will have to find a new hobby. I hope that such a time does not come to pass or at least not any time soon. I am also very confident that the vendor from whom I purchased my stocks of Sassafras sourced their material legally and responsibly. In part because I am concerned about legally and responsibly obtained wood, I am reluctant to buy from sellers outside of well-established and known vendors. I am highly unlikely, for example, to purchase exotic wood from auction sites, such as Ebay, because of uncertain sourcing and documentation, as well as the potential, even likelihood, of material being misidentified in order to achieve a higher selling price.
However, due to the commercial scarcity of some exotic imported wood species, resorting to auction sites such as Ebay or Etsy may be the only way to obtain samples of species that are not routinely commercially harvested. The potential risks of buying in these marketplaces have to be balanced against the desire to work with a specific species of wood. That is inherently an individual decision.