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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.
(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.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.