Within the European Union, 27.5% of all tropical roundwood and sawn wood is imported via Belgium (mainly via the port of
Antwerp). A substantial part of the global timber trade is illegal and illegal logging is considered to be the most profitable
violation of biodiversity regulations. Belgium therefore plays a key role in the international timber trade and has an important
responsibility to (1) monitor the trade in timber and timber products and (2) build research capacity for timber identification
and apply it in an enforcement context. Worldwide, there is a lack of capacity for both forensic and routine verification
procedures in the timber trade. There is also a need for reference databases for relevant wood identification techniques.
Given the enormous scale of the illegal timber trade and the associated problems, the project aims to initiate the installation of
a Belgian forensic wood identification center at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA). The wood collection of the
RMCA is one of the largest in the world and contains over 80,000 wood samples, including more than 13,000 species. This
Forensic Wood Centre will be the Belgian reference center for wood identification and will include both scientific services and
scientific research.
Examples of possible scientific services (40%) are (1) carrying out wood identification through routine analyses of wood
anatomical characteristics (namely through services to the Belgian inspection services and customs), (2) analyses of material
potentially composed of different taxa, (3) acting as a reference address - including the possibility to call on the RMCA for wood
analysis (for a fee) - for wood importers in Belgium and Europe, (4) providing training and (5) developing a sampling strategy
with customs and DG Environment aimed at systematic controls of the wood trade. Concerning scientific research (60%), there
is a need to modernize, improve and automate routine techniques (especially in the area of applying machine learning, and
Direct Analysis in Real Time Mass Spectrometry and origin identification), as well as to improve the identification of wood
species in wood panels (plywood, MDF, chipboard). This is not possible with the currently available techniques, while several
reports indicate that misidentification of wood species often occurs in these wood products.