News about the poaching and smuggling of threatened species often centers on products like tiger bone, rhino horn or pangolin scales. But much of the world’s illegally sourced wildlife products are actually trees — in particular, 33 hardwood species in the Dalbergia genus, better known as rosewood. Rosewood can sell for tens of thousands of dollars per cubic meter and has the highest overall trafficking value of any wildlife product in the world: Between 2014 and 2018, rosewood accounted for 32% of the monetary value of illegally traded wildlife products seized by law enforcement. But a recent paper in the journal Biological Conservation finds that new technologies could save the world’s rosewoods from being little more than plunder.

Demand for the richly colored, aromatic and durable timber continues to grow in China, where rosewood furniture has long been a symbol of status and luxury. International regulations have failed to stop the rampant harvesting of the tropical trees, whose value only grows with their increasing rarity. Two Southeast Asian species — Siamese (Dalbergia cochinchinensis) and Burmese rosewood (D. oliveri) — are now critically endangered, driving rosewood traders to other rainforests in Africa and South America. This appetite threatens the very existence of the unique trees as well as their important ecological roles, such as enriching soil with nitrogen, reducing soil erosion, and providing habitat for wildlife.

But technologies exist that could help stop the trees’ plight, according to the paper by a team of scientists at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden’s Center of Integrative Conservation in Yunnan, China, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Artificial intelligence, remote sensing, drones, blockchain and DNA metabarcoding could give policymakers, nonprofits and law enforcement the tools they need to truly curb the illegal logging and trade of rosewood. Many of these methods have proven useful in other conservation contexts and are already being adapted to rosewood conservation.

“I’m very optimistic about the conservation of Dalbergia,” said study lead author, Shabir Rather, a conservation researcher. “Those techniques are definitely promising to counter the illegal logging.”

Logging of threatened rosewoods continues in spite of many countries banning their harvest and a 2017 decision to list all Dalbergia species under Appendix II of CITES, the global wildlife trade convention. This listing means rosewood can’t be traded internationally without a permit. One of the challenges in stopping illegal logging is that many Southeast Asian forests with rosewood, for instance, are too remote and inaccessible for forest officials to monitor effectively, Rather said. But video-equipped drones employing AI algorithms could detect new logging routes or early signs of deforestation, potentially flagging illicit activity in real time and allowing forest officials to quickly intervene. Such technologies are costly, but “it will definitely save us money and manpower” on forest monitoring, Rather said.

Such systems could be complemented by remote-sensing data from satellites: visual details of past logging activities and forest fragmentation could be fed into AI algorithms, which then predict where illegal logging is likely to occur in the future.

“I think this predictive mapping of illegal logging is a potential area that could be really beneficial,” said Antony Bagott, data manager at the U.K.-based wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC.

New tech could also make it easier to trace legally harvested rosewood, disincentivizing illicit logging and making it harder to pass off illegally sourced rosewood as legal timber. In many tropical countries, harvest and transport permits for timber exist only on paper, which can be easily falsified, altered or copied. But technologies like blockchain, which uses a tamper-proof digital ledger to track timber as it travels from forest to consumer, could improve traceability, according to the paper. Blockchain has been used to trace sustainably sourced wood from Germany’s Black Forest and the U.S.’s Brosnan Forest. That said, challenges remain: blockchain requires expensive hardware, software and a stable internet connection, as well as cooperation between all actors involved in the timber supply chain.

There are simpler ways of improving traceability. In recent years, the Tanzania Forest Service has been using Timber Tracker, a tool TRAFFIC helped develop that employs technology similar to what supermarkets use to track inventory. Each truckload of timber gets a unique identifier, which forest service officials at checkpoints across the country can scan to check the transport permits. They can also upload a photo of the trucks so subsequent officials can verify that no suspect timber was added after the fact. Thanks to this simple act of digitizing transport permits, as well as the country’s timber licensing and monitoring system, forest service officials say that government revenue from forest products has increased by 50%, according to Chen Hin Keong, TRAFFIC’s forestry lead.

Smart technologies could also help at the other end of the supply chain. Currently, customs officers have little way of verifying that imported wood indeed represents legally harvested wood and not illegal rosewood that’s labeled as legal. In response, TRAFFIC has adapted a wood species identification system created by the analytics company Agritix into a tool for enforcement agencies. To use the new tool, called Wood ID, officials attach a magnifying glass to a smartphone and take a photo of a prepared wood sample, which is uploaded via an app to the cloud. Once in the cloud, AI algorithms approximate the species by comparing the photo with information from professionally identified wood images. The app can currently identify 31 species, including Siamese and Burmese rosewood, with more than 90% certainty, Chen said. That’s enough to give custom authorities “the confidence to either detain the shipment for further investigation or to release it,” he said. Customs officers are currently piloting the new system in Vietnam, a transit hub for timber.

But because Wood ID’s results are based on probabilities, they can’t yet be used in court. That’s where more reliable methods of species identification come in. In a study published in August, Rather identified unique segments in the genomes of 31 Dalbergia species that can be used to determine the species, a method called DNA metabarcoding. Though the genetic analysis requires time and expertise, it could be an important additional tool for custom officers, Rather said.

It will require a combination of technologies to make a dent in the illegal rosewood trade — as well as more funds, improvements in internet connectivity in rosewood regions, and extensive collaboration with communities, timber companies, policymakers and law enforcement to properly implement them, Rather said.

There may be other technologies on the horizon. AI could help screen for anomalies in trade data that imply illegal trade, or sift through online products to identify illicit wood, Bagott said. Meanwhile, Rather is currently scrutinizing the molecular processes that allow Dalbergia trees to produce the luxurious wood they’re known for. If he can identify the genes responsible, then less-threatened trees could be genetically engineered to produce similar kinds of wood. That could reduce the pressure on rosewood trees as well as their native ecosystems.

“Dalbergia is one of the highly important species [groups],” Rather said, “so we must conserve it.”

Banner image: A logging worker stands on Mukula logs. Mukula is a rare and slow-growing hardwood unique to southern and central Africa. Mukula has been illegally logged and traded from Zambia and DRC to China for the last decade, feeding the increasing demand of “rosewood” in the Chinese market. Image © Lu Guang / Greenpeace.

Citations:

Siriwat, P., & Nijman, V. (2023). Quantifying the illegal high-value rosewood trade and criminal trade networks in the Greater Mekong Region. Biological Conservation, 277, 109826. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109826

Rather, S. A., Kumar, A., Liu, H., & Schneider, H. (2025). Rosewood at crossroads: A modern paradigm to secure the survival of the world’s most trafficked wild species. Biological Conservation, 311, 111399. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2025.111399

Srivastava, R., & Bharti, V. (2023). Importance of Dalbergia sissoo for restoration of degraded land: A case study of Indian dry tropical vindhyan regions. Ecological Engineering, 194, 107021. doi:10.1016/j.ecoleng.2023.107021

Rather, S.A., Wang, K., Wang, T., Liu, H., & Schneider, H. (2024). Comparative chloroplast genome analysis reveals powerful barcodes for combatting illegal logging of CITES-listed threatened Asian rosewoods (Dalbergia, Leguminosae, Papilionoidae). Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 208(4), 347-368. doi:10.1093/botlinnean/boae086

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