WASHINGTON—The USDA Forest Service hosted two field trips in the Seattle/Tacoma area of Washington for more than 40 delegates from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Experts Group on Illegal Logging and Associated Trade. The experts’ group is tasked with promoting trade in legally harvested forest products, combatting illegal logging and associated trade, and building capacity. The member economies of APEC account for over 50% of the world’s forest and 80% of international trade in wood products.

On the first field trip, participants visited the University of Washington's Center for Environmental Forensic Science to learn about several types of wood identification technologies, including the machine vision XyloTron tool and the Nucleic Acid Barcode Identification Tool that utilizes genetics. Participants also visited APA—The Engineered Wood Association Mass Timber Testing Laboratory—for several demonstrations on the quality testing and functionality of engineered wood products including a wood structural panel bending test, a full-scale cyclic shear wall test, a wood structural panel performance test and glue bond durability test, and a full-scale structural glue-laminated timber bending test. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service exhibited its new mobile forensic laboratory, The Woodshed, which is deployed to U.S. ports of entry to identify illegal timber milled from endangered species around the world.

Dr. Ratih Damayanti, acting director of Scientific Collection Management at Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, reflected, “This is the most memorable field trip I've ever experienced. We know that U.S. wood forensic science is the most reputable in the world, and through this field trip, I can see and touch what I have seen so far through seminars and the internet.” She noted that “collaboration and sharing of available information could benefit all the economies involved in the timber products exchange process.”

For the second field trip, delegates visited the 190,000-acre Weyerhaeuser Vail Tree Farm. They met with the tree farm manager and experts on sustainable forest management. Participants saw various stages of tree growth, learned about silviculture and sustainability practices, and discussed the similarities and differences between U.S. forestry practices and those in their home economies. The participants also visited the Weyerhaeuser Olympia Export Yard, where they observed and discussed Weyerhaeuser’s efforts to ensure traceability and legality of the logs that pass through the yard each year. The export yard tracks and sorts high-grade logs from both Weyerhaeuser lands and other suppliers before they are loaded on ships destined for Asia.

The international participants were particularly interested in the scale and capacity of private forest ownership in the United States. Weyerhaeuser owns more than 10 million acres across the U.S. and has extensive in-house scientific research and management capacity. Most participants hail from countries where forest land is almost entirely government owned and managed.

APEC is a major economic forum comprised of 21 economy trading partners. Jennifer Conje, assistant director of Policy, Forest Service International Programs, is the current chair of the APEC Experts Group on Illegal Logging and Associated Trade sub-forum.

Through its policy unit, International Programs works to ensure the U.S. forestry community’s interests are represented and reflected in decisions within multilateral forums like APEC.