Tracing tropical timber

Informations projet

Timtrace

N° de convention de subvention: 665275

DOI

10.3030/665275

Projet clôturé

Date de signature de la CE 30 Avril 2015

Date de début 1 Octobre 2015

Date de fin 31 Mars 2017

Financé au titre de

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Coût total

€ 148 387,00

Contribution de l’UE

€ 148 387,00

Coordonné par

WAGENINGEN UNIVERSITY
Netherlands

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

Période du rapport: 2015-10-01 au 2017-03-31

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

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.