Fingerprinting Wood to Curb Illegal Deforestation

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https://eos.org/articles/fingerprinting-wood-to-curb-illegal-deforestation

By Rishika Pardikar, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: More than a quarter of global forest loss is driven by commodity production, which includes logging wood. Though illegal deforestation supplies some of the timber in products such as furniture and window frames, independently verifying origins of the wood in finished products is a daunting task. Scientists from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands analyzed the makeup of wood samples from nearly 1,000 different trees in Cameroon, Congo, and Gabon in Central Africa, as well as the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, and found that it’s possible to trace their origins to subnational scales. The researchers tout the analysis as a step toward a global timber-tracing tool....

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