Combining wood anatomy and chemical fingerprinting maximizes tropical timber identification success

Key message 

A combination approach to wood identification methods yields superior results when identifying timber originating from the Central African tropics. This is demonstrated by the performance of DART-TOFMS as a fine-tuning step after the microscopic analysis of wood anatomy. These identifications reveal species misdeclarations in small-scale timber markets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with detrimental ecological and socio-economic effects.

Keywords
Microscopy; DART-TOFMS; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Illegal logging; Local markets

Publication
Monnoye, M., Wasukundi, M., Bourland, N. et al. Combining wood anatomy and chemical fingerprinting maximizes tropical timber identification success. Annals of Forest Science 82, 44 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13595-025-01317-3

Data availability
Data is provided within the manuscript or supplementary information files. Supplementary material is provided in a public repository and can be accessed via the following: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.7957109.v3 The repository contains a collection of the IAWA feature strings per sample, heatmaps and classifications of the metabolome profiles via DART-TOFMS and photomicrographs of the identified taxa.

Handling editor
Erwin Dreyer