Tree DNA to Convict a Poacher for the First Time in Federal Court
17th August 2021
After fires ripped through Washington State’s Olympic National Forest in 2018, firefighters found evidence of a tree heist gone wrong — sawed-off stumps of protected bigleaf maple trees.
They turned to tree DNA — a new area of forensic evidence — to connect the stumps with the missing tree and caught the poachers red-handed.
Well, brown-handed, anyway.