UW-Madison: Forensic botany course covers legal side of wood, pollen, contraband logging

CONTACT: Sara Hotchkiss, shotchkiss@wisc.edu, 808-895-0442

MADISON – Whether it’s a putative perpetrator with a peculiar pollen in his poncho, a possible plantation of proscribed opiates, or a shipment of lumber from a tree protected by international treaty, botanical identification can make or break a criminal case.

This spring, UW-Madison students are getting a chance to expand their skills beyond the traditional academic realm in Botany 575: Forensic Botany.

The new course focuses on science as problem solving, but also fills utterly practical needs, says Sara Hotchkiss, associate professor of botany and an expert in pollen identification. “I have helped coroners analyze pollen found on a jacket sleeve. If you want to know where a person was – or was not – finding a lot of tree pollen creates a different set of possibilities than finding ragweed pollen.”

Forensics can provide a real-world use for esoteric knowledge, says volunteer course instructor Alex Wiedenhoeft, team leader of the Center for Wood Anatomy Research (CWAR) at the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison.

Criminology can benefit from knowledge of wood, leaves, diatoms, pollen and algae, adds Wiedenhoeft, an adjunct assistant professor of botany at UW-Madison and one of the world’s foremost experts in identifying woody species. “These are questions that criminal investigators are not asking as regularly as they could.”