Thieves who poach valuable burls from the Redwood National Forest are a big problem, but finding the manpower to protect all 133,000 acres of protected space at all times is impossible. What to do?
Log in to view the full article
Thieves who poach valuable burls from the Redwood National Forest are a big problem, but finding the manpower to protect all 133,000 acres of protected space at all times is impossible. What to do?
An unpublished study from researchers in the criminal justice and forestry industries experts provides measures that are less resource-heavy but, they hope, better at protecting the burls from poachers, according to The Smithsonian Magazine.
The measures are rooted in the assumption that crime is easier to prevent than solve. The study used mapping software to model the surface of the earth over the park and plot the location of hundreds of redwood trees. From there, he highlighted sites of previous burl thefts, and studied the locations to determine what made them targets.
The study concluded that most thefts were clustered near one another and occurred fewer than 400 feet from an access road. Study co-author Stephen Pires, a criminal justice professor at Florida International University, suggests park officials should draw a 1,000-foot buffer on either side of all park roads and determine if any trees there exhibit burls that are closer to the ground and ripe for poaching.
Other suggestions included adding closed-circuit television cameras and license plate imaging at park gates, as well as finding “valuable” trees in the park and marking them so they can be tracked somehow. He also believes shops that purchase burls should be required to copy the photo IDs of all sellers, much like pawn shops do.
Apart from the study’s recommendations, experts are also relying on the emerging field of “forest forensics” to match illegally logged wood with the stumps at the scene of the crime.
Customs agents can reference a database of thousands of tree chemical “footprints,” for example, that can help them track endangered and trafficked wood.
DNA science has made it easier to track seized wood back to the plant it was harvested from.
Trained eyes can also detect “wound wood,” which is what happens to the wood at the site of a catastrophic event, like a chainsaw cutting through a burl. Wound wood can help date logging events, which can help prosecutors create a timeline when looking for suspects.
Read the full story on SmithsonianMag.com.
