Tracking of Timber

The determination of the origin of timber has been another major focus of work for several years. Here, Agroisolab has a unique selling point in the world. Possibly also influenced by our work, since 2016 the stable isotope technique is being recommended by the - European Commission Note of Guidance Document for the EU Timber Regulation - as a recommended tracing technique.

Anyway, since 2006, Agroisolab has been working intensively on the development of stable isotope applications for determining the origin of timber and is continuously expanding its timber database.

In various international projects, Agroisolab was repeatedly able to demonstrate the reliability of the stable isotope method. It has been shown that the stable isotope method can be successfully used to verify the origin of timber from concessions (EU / GTZ-project) and provides more robust information than the genetic method.

This robustness could also be confirmed in an international project of the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) for the mapping of timber from African countries, where again the stable isotope method could show a better performance in the blind test compared to genetics.

Today, the stable isotope method is without any doubt the leading reference methods for determining the origin of timber and our developed methods has been successfully used in the World Forest ID consortium (WFID) to establish origin databases like the European timber database.

Today, Agroisolab is working on many topics related to the determination of the origin of wood, such as the verification of the origin of oak (China / Europe) or teak (Myanmar issue).

Considering the latest EUDR, Agroisolab has started the service to build up extensive customer databases, to protect and provide more transparency for the customer in their market. For the mapping of those logging concessions our sampling guideline developed with WWF is still used.

However, today the detection of birch from Russia is still in the main focus of our analysis.

Finally, Agroisolab is one of the few laboratories in the world that can determine the species of timber using the metabolomic fingerprint (DART-TOF).

The quality of the timber measurement is assured by international and European ring tests as well as by own initiatives. For example, Agroisolab operates an intercomparison test platform for stable isotope laboratories (KPT project) with more than 28 international stable isotope laboratories.

Since 2006, Agroisolab methods are of course accredited according to DIN EN ISO / IEC 17025:2018.