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posted by Fnord666 on Friday March 08 2019, @01:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the scanning-logs dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Origin and species: fighting illegal logging with science

A timeworn laboratory in Britain's Royal Botanic Gardens may not seem like the obvious epicentre of efforts to halt international illegal logging.

Beakers bubble away on a hotplate, while suspect guitars that have been sent by customs officials for testing sit on top of shelves lined with tattered old journals and reference books in a multitude of languages.

But scientists at the Wood Anatomy Laboratory, part of the research centre at the gardens in Kew, southwest London, are working on a new global project to help precisely identify the origin and species of timber.

Illegal logging is estimated to account for 15 to 30 percent of all timber traded worldwide, according to Interpol, with an estimated annual value of $51 billion to $152 billion (45 billion to 134 billion euros) in 2017.

Much of the import and export business relies on paper trails for verification.

However experts hope that their new project can, in future, provide enforcement agencies with some hard science that can quickly identify through checks whether a wood species is as claimed, and exactly where it was grown.

"I'm hoping it will really help to reduce illegal logging," said Peter Gasson, the Kew institution's research leader in wood and timber.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 08 2019, @02:30PM (5 children)

    For starters, we should be studying how to get currently high-value trees to grow taller, faster, straighter, and to be less picky about where they grow well. Do that and you alleviate most of the pressure on the trees you want to stay put by making them less valuable.

    Also, I am sorely disappointed in the lack of Monty Python lumberjack puns in the department, title, or summary.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @02:52PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @02:52PM (#811534)

    > taller, faster, straighter,

    Um, you need to learn a lot more about high value trees.

    Some of the most expensive are sought after because the grain is wildly twisted/gnarled, and often dense from slow growth. Take rosewood for example (used for the sides of acoustic and classical guitars) -- the grain rises and falls from any flat surface you try to establish and this gives it a special optical (and before finishing, tactile) character. It's a real pain to work, easy to have a grain pop out, but very rewarding when you succeed.

    This is what they are talking about, rare tropical woods. Some years back, Gibson Guitars was raided because they had wood from a protected source, https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2011/08/31/140090116/why-gibson-guitar-was-raided-by-the-justice-department [npr.org] In this case protected ebony.

    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 08 2019, @03:23PM

      by Arik (4543) on Friday March 08 2019, @03:23PM (#811544) Journal
      "Take rosewood for example (used for the sides of acoustic and classical guitars)"

      Err, what? Well, yes, it has been used on a few models, but mahogany is much more common for the back and sides. Rosewood is most commonly used for fingerboards.

      If it's so hard for the feds to figure out what species a wood is and whether or not it's "legal" then how do they expect everyone else to know? That's a big problem with the Lacey act enforcement. It can effectively reverse the burden of proof, by requiring "verification" but not really defining what verification means. The feds proceeded to interpret that to mean that you simply couldn't do it, by reading a very high standard through that single word.

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    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 08 2019, @03:36PM (2 children)

      Trust me, I know plenty about woodworking and the materials thereof. My mouse is right now sitting on a Brazilian mahogany end table I built back in my 30s. I was speaking of species characteristics because we're talking mass logging here.

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      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @05:22PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 08 2019, @05:22PM (#811606)

        Buzz,

        The parent commenter's points still stand.
        You can breed a species to have those qualities you mentioned, but they tend to be at odds with the desirable qualities of the endangered wood.
        All the qualities you mentioned (grows straight, fast, in poor soil) are true of pine trees bred for plantations. If you could breed a rosewood tree with those qualities, I'd say it's likely it would appear in many ways "similar" to pine.

        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 08 2019, @08:53PM

          No, it would not. For starters, rosewood is a hardwood not a softwood; the grain is going to be tighter and better looking pretty much no matter what you do. Next, you have to assume those creating the altered varieties of trees for the purposes of making money off them know why what they are selling is valuable. Further, burl and twisted grain are all nice and fine for furniture or detail work and they do raise the price of any given board but they're not universally desirable and are not what sets the market price of an unremarkable piece of mahogany, purple heart, ebony, cherry, etc...

          Finally, come take a gander at what cherry trees in TN look like versus the ones in OK. You can't log cherry trees in OK at all for anything larger than a baseball bat and finding a straight piece that big would be a blue-eyed miracle. TN cherry trees you can get a hell of board feet of 1x12s out of a very unremarkable tree. Hell, I loaded two truck loads of cherry up for firewood for a pittance a couple years back that came from a tree straight enough a logger would have jizzed himself on the spot. Makes some excellent brisket in the smoker.

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