Tracing tropical timber

Project Information

Timtrace

Grant agreement ID: 665275

DOI

10.3030/665275

Project closed

EC signature date 30 April 2015

Start date 1 October 2015

End date 31 March 2017

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 148 387,00

EU contribution

€ 148 387,00

Coordinated by

WAGENINGEN UNIVERSITY
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Timtrace (Tracing tropical timber)

Reporting period: 2015-10-01 to 2017-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

An estimated 50% of the tropical timber that enters the European market is illegally harvested. The trade in illegally harvested tropical timber disrupts economies and ecosystems, undermines environmentally sustainable alternatives and reduces the options for future use of our natural resources. To implement new European and international legislation intended to eliminate this illegal trade, independent tools are needed to verify the legal status of timber. We developed a forensic tool, Timtrace (www.timtrace.eu) to trace the claimed geographic origin of tropical timber. Timtrace uses two methods (1) chemical tracing using stable isotopes ratios in the wood and (2) genetic tracing using DNA analyses based on wood.

In the first study on isotopic tracing for tropical timbers we found a good match between wood isotopic composition and isotopic signature of rain water, showing the potential for isotopic tracing at large spatial scales. Yet, based on wood isotopic signature we could not differentiate timber samples sourced from different concessions within an African country. In a second technical feasibility study, we found genetic differences in wood of trees derived from nearby forest concessions and were successful in assigning blind samples to concessions of origin based on DNA. During the project we significantly expanded our reference databases with isotopic and genetic information, which now contain >8500 entries from 43 tropical timbers in 19 countries, chiefly for isotopic data.