Post by Victor Deklerck

The World Forest ID 2025 Annual Report is out, and I'm proud to reflect on what we've built together this year. 🧪 A big part of my work has been developing the chemical measurement protocols that underpin our verification work, ensuring that labs around the world get to the same result and that our methodology is globally scalable. This only works through close collaboration across our laboratory network, and I'm grateful to be doing this alongside brilliant teams at Fera Science Ltd. ,(Simon Kelly, Katharina Heinrich) Agroisolab GmbH (Markus Boner, Sabine Hofem), Oritain (Russell Frew), Adelaide University (Tony Hall, Arif Malik) and others. 🕵 That scientific rigor is what makes real-world applications possible. This year we worked on several cases where scientific evidence was used alongside border enforcement processes, a tangible demonstration that forensic origin verification is moving from research into regulatory practice. A special shout-out to my colleague Dr Charlotte C. Smith who enabled this scalability by leading on the development of our online evaluation platform (https://lnkd.in/e-rBpXG4). 🎓 I also had the privilege of chairing on the World Forest ID Scientific Stewardship Committee (SSC), which met at my home institution, Meise Botanic Garden, in November. The Committee provides independent oversight of World Forest ID's scientific work, reviews our methods, and makes sure our tools remain credible and reproducible as they scale into enforcement and compliance contexts. I want to express my sincere gratitude to the other members of the SSC for their crucial support: Gabriela Nardoto, Luiz Antonio Martinelli, Pieter Zuidema, Iskandar Z Siregar, Andy Lowe, Dyana Bourobou, Abubakar Ali Shidiki and Jose Ugarte. 2025 was a fantastic, productive and effective year, made possible by a great team and network: Jade Saunders, Cicely Podmore, Dr Charlotte C. Smith, Jakub Truszkowski, Laura Van Arsdel, Johnie Clayton, Alfredo Rodriguez Zunino, Arthur La Rosa Sánchez Navarro, Guy Herman ZANGUIM TCHOUTEZOU, Bogdan Buliga, Filip Vandelook, Steven Dessein, Steven Janssens, John Simeone, Naren Ramakrishnan and many many others.