Thread: Stable Isotope tracking of timber

JMK, stable (and Unstable) isotope tracking was one of my research areas in my day job.
We applied it mainly to wine but is did not work all that well because a lot of wine is blended or mixed varietal.
Our main work was in dust in ice cores where we could track where in the world the dust had come from going back hundreds of thousands of years.
A couple of my mates in the US apply it to tracking human movement via the isotopes in hair. Apparently they have done a lot of business with Guantanamo Bay residents, "Yes you were in Pakistan between X and Y" etc
The claim that it can be within 10km is for a limited number of species as they need to have a established a worldwide data base sampled on the 10km scale which simply has not been done. It works for rare and valuable trees that live in smaller forests and locations.

I understand your point, Bob.

At least it shows that the FSC is trying to get beyond the clunky and easily circumvented paper audit and to try to get to a system that will ensure that we can, eventually, tell if the wood was harvested from a sustainable forest or not.

Some quite obscure techniques have been used to identify the origins of stolen logs / timber and to identify the culprits in illegal logging operations. Oil sample analysis of an oil leak from machinery found at the scene of an illegal logging event in Far North Queensland was crucial evidence in one successful prosecution.