Lumber sleuths

Abstract

To enforce laws and treaties that protect endangered tree species, federal agents first have to recognize those species when they come across wood they suspect came from illegal logging operations. A US Fish and Wildlife Service lab has spent a decade developing a mass spectrometry approach to rapidly identify wood by species. Now the scientists are taking it on the road. Some years ago, David Gehl made an unusual trip to Siberia. “I went to lots of sawmills and forests and came back from Russia and China with, like, 20 kg of wood boards on my back,” he recalls. Gehl was no ordinary tourist. He was in the region as part of an undercover probe by a nonprofit group called the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). He was following up on suspicions that oak imported into the US from China had come from forests in eastern Russia where logging was prohibited.