lancaster: if you look at data provided by wwf, global witness, and eia, you find that not only are we going into a record-breaki year of land defenders murdered to protect their forest and environment, the u.s. economy is depressed by about $1 million due to illegal logging imports, and illegal logging is the third-largest trans-national crime. goddard: a tree, in fact, is more complex than we know. it has more chromosomes than we have. it can easily be a victim because it may be illegal to take that species, depending on what genus and species it is or where it's located. lancaster: trees can be poached just as any sort of traditional wildlife can be poached. if you can't identify it, you can't protect it, and so our goal is really to develop a database that can be used, hopefully one day, by anybody in the world in order to do this sort of identification to help them fight illegal logging. huff: a lot of cases we've had, it's very difficult to prove that wood was obtained illegally once it gets processed in a mill or once it's removed from the national forest. basically, we have a s