Before you can prosecute a thief, you have to know what he stole. This holds true for crimes against people - and crimes against nature.
Southern Oregon is home to the world’s only criminal forensics lab dedicated to this kind of evidence. Its traditional focus has been on endangered animal cases.
But that’s changing, thanks to an international push to stem the trafficking of hardwood from illegally logged forests.
There’s a small woodshop at the US Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland, Oregon. Instead of a sawdust-covered garage, this shop is more like a library archive – holding some of the rarest woods on the planet.
Ken Goddard: “African mahogany, Aussie burl eucalyptus, Brazilian ebony, a mahogany from the coastal south of Mexico… these woods have come from all over.”
Lab Director Ken Goddard flips through cell-phone sized planks, leaning neatly on the dozens of shelves.
He says these samples are used to help identify shipments of endangered wood protected by international treaty.
Ken Goddard: “Basically you would not continue an investigation unless you’re pretty sure it’s an endangered or threatened species.”
With wood, this can be challenging once the limbs, leaves and DNA-rich sapwood have been removed.
For the past five years, just a few steps down the hall from the woodshop, Deputy Lab Director Ed Espinoza has been at the center of the lab’s forensic work on timber.
Ed Espinoza: “If somebody had just called me out of the blue first saying, ‘Can you identify wood with your mass spec?’ I would have said, ‘No, that’s crazy.’”
The “mass spec” is a relatively new technology called a DART-TOF mass spectrometer. It doesn’t look or sound like much - kind of like a massive humming laser printer with a blue propane cylinder attached - but it’s an extremely powerful piece of technology.
A few years back an inspector asked if the lab could identify an incense tree called agarwood. It struck Espinoza that he may be able to use the DART to identify the wood, which is so aromatic it’s used to make perfume.
Ed Espinoza: ““Originally we had no idea if it was going to pan out or not. But if it had an odor… This instrument is kind of like a massive nose almost,”
Espinoza planed off a small sliver of the wood. Then with tweezers, he passed the sample through the DART, which took a big whiff of the chemical compounds inside. A few seconds later, the analysis showed agarwood’s unique chemical signature.
Ed Espinoza: “It didn’t occur to me until after the fact that I could apply it to other types of wood.”
Espinoza and his team began collecting baseline samples of protected trees from around the world – the ones stored in the lab’s woodshop. Now the Ashland Forensics Lab can use the DART to identify many types of wood down to the species level.
In April, the Wildlife Forensics Lab became the first and only facility internationally certified to identify wood planks – giving their forensic work greater credence in court.
Shelley Gardner is the Illegal Logging Program Coordinator for the US Forest Service. She says advances in wood identification technology give law enforcement a better chance to successfully prosecute trafficking cases - and stop illegally harvested wood from becoming someone’s new dining room set or guitar.
Shelley Gardner: “With that knowledge, I think their interest increases. Knowing they can, if they are investigating a case, send a sample to a laboratory.”
Admittedly, tree cases aren’t quite as exciting or appealing to the public as, say, endangered monkey or tiger trafficking. Again Espinoza.
Ed Espinoza: “Trees are inherently kind of boring, there’s this big thing. And we try to talk it up, but how many of us go around planting trees, very few.”
Shelley Gardner: “With that knowledge, I think their interest increases. Knowing they can, if they are investigating a case, send a sample to a laboratory.”
Admittedly, tree cases aren’t quite as exciting or appealing to the public as, say, endangered monkey or tiger trafficking.
Ed Espinoza: “Trees are inherently kind of boring, there’s this big thing. And we try to talk it up, but how many of us go around planting trees, very few.”
But international timber trafficking is huge business – with an Interpol-estimated value of up to $100 billion dollars.
Lab Director Ken Goddard says there are broader conservation goals as well.
Ken Goddard: “I think these wood cases are far more important than just the wood. Trees can be regrown. That may not be true for the species that lived in that forest.”
That’s why disrupting illegal logging could be just as important for monkeys and tigers as for the trees themselves.
