Fighting ivory trafficking with forensic science
Monday, August 14, 2017 - 06:52
in Biology & Nature
Two weeks ago, Kevin Uno was on a field expedition in Kenya when he got a message he'd been hoping for: the NY Department of Environmental Conservation had officially approved his request to sample some ivory that had been confiscated from retail stores in the U.S. The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory geochemist and his colleague, University of Washington research professor Samuel Wasser, use radiocarbon dating and DNA testing to determine when and where an elephant was killed; sampling this recently seized ivory would be an opportunity for them to find out whether it was recently harvested, and help law enforcement target the poachers responsible.