As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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Investigators used the trees’ genes to match them to wood sold by poachers.
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There are more than 60,000 tree species in the world, and they are all genetically distinct.
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Specially shaped maple wood is valued by musical instrument manufacturers.
For the first time ever, investigators are using tree DNA as evidence in court to help convict timber poachers.
In July 2021, Justin Andrew Wilke was convicted of conspiracy, theft of public property, depredation of public property, trafficking in illegally harvested timber, and attempted trafficking in illegally harvested timber, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington.
Later that year, Wilke was sentenced to 20 months in prison for poaching maple trees from the Olympic National Forest.
These trees are especially valuable because they are used to make musical instruments such as guitars, clarinets, and piano parts. The most coveted musical maples have special markings called “figures” that indicate their higher value for musical use. There are many types of patterned maple; All have unique patterns.
“[Washington’s] The Olympic National Forest is known for its tall, lush trees with wide trunks. ” washington post Report. “The bigleaf maple is one of the most prized tree species, and its patterned wood is often used in woodworking and making musical instruments. But it is illegal to cut down trees in national forests without a permit.” These thefts reportedly cost up to $100 million in damage and lost work hours annually.
Court documents describe how Wilke and his co-conspirator, Shawn Edward Williams, infiltrated public lands in Washington state in the summer of 2018. The two men chopped down trees and then cut them into circles to make them easier to haul out of the woods. (You can’t exactly back up your legal logging equipment to where you just stole public trees.) The court estimated that Wilk made $7,000 by selling the stolen wood using forged documents.
But then, the trees’ genetic information enables them to fight back against thieves. Richard Crohn, a research geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, told the court that the timber sold was consistent with the remains of three felled trees. Prosecutors said the possibility of a false alarm was billion— A 1 followed by 36 zeros.
It may sound strange that tree genes could be used in court, but plants, like humans and animals, are made of cells that contain genetic information. Plant cells are unique due to qualities such as their cellulose cell walls, but we have much more in common than that.
So how are trees genetically differentiated? Different species have different genes, unlike cat or dog breeds, which are all the same species but have different characteristics. There are more than 100 species of maple trees alone, each with its own special genes. The most iconic maple tree, the fig maple, is a sycamore in the family Sapindaceae. Compared with ginkgo tree, Ginkgo bilobafrom a now almost extinct family Ginkgo family. You have to go back to the kingdom level to find the location of these two leafy trees… branch separate.
All of this makes the trees ideal for general genetic research, as well as genetic identification in cases like Wilk’s. It’s easy to see how tree geneticists perform so The two trees were determined to be identical based on the unique fingerprints of each sample across the region 60,000 Tree species from around the world.
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