Glossary Terms

A riparian forest buffer is an area of trees and shrubs located adjacent to streams, lakes, ponds, and wetlands. It can be used to intercept sediment, nutrients, pesticides, and other materials in surface runoff and reduce nutrients and other pollutants in shallow subsurface water flow.

The uppermost layer in a forest, formed by the crowns of the trees.

CoC refers to the chronological documentation or paper trail, showing the purchase, custody, control, and transfer of a good. In FSC: CoC tracks FSC certified material through the production process from the forest to the consumer, including all successive stages of processing, transformation, manufacturing and distribution. The CoC enables businesses and consumers to make environmentally responsible purchasing decisions.

Developed the President’s Initiative Against Illegal Logging, a precursor to the U.S. Lacey Act.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security heads Customs and Border Protection.

The U.S. Department of the Interiori heads the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Forest Legality Alliance co-founder. EIA lead undercover investigations on timber trade to expose illegal logging that lead to the passage of the Lacey Act amendments.

Violation of the Lacey Act by not submitting or falsifying information on a declaration form (PPQ Form 505).

A contract, license, or permit granted to a firm or a person to extract and market timber (timber concession) or other produce commercially from a defined area of the forest within a given period.

The World Bank’s Forest Strategy acknowledges illegal logging and lack of appropriate forest governance as a major obstacle to the efforts of client countries to alleviate poverty, to develop their natural resources and to protect global and local environmental services and values. The World Bank actively supports regional forest law enforcement and governance (FLEG) initiatives and hosts a multi-donor partnership on FLEG in support of these initiatives.

The FLA is an international, multi-stakeholder initiative designed to achieve better forest governance and biodiversity conservation by reducing demand for illegally harvested forest products and increasing the capacity of supply chains to deliver legal wood and paper.

Beginning in 1996, a small group of leaders from forest industry, donors, and environmental groups began to meet to consider the array of challenges facing forest conservation and began to identify common ground. This group recognized the respective contributions and limits of their own institutions and decided to create a new organization - Forest Trends - to expand this work of bridging traditional divides and promoting market-based approaches to forest conservation.

A category of biological classification ranking between the family and the species, made up of related species or an isolated species exhibiting unusual differentiation, and being designated by a Latin or latinized capitalized singular noun.

Global Witness exposes the corrupt exploitation of natural resources and international trade systems, to drive campaigns that end impunity, resource-linked conflict, and human rights and environmental abuses.

The Hardwood Federation is the largest DC-based hardwood industry trade association, representing thousands of hardwood businesses in every state in the U.S. and acting as the industry’s advocacy voice on Capitol Hill. It is an umbrella organization representing the majority of trade associations engaged in the manufacturing, wholesaling, or distribution of North American hardwood lumber, veneer, plywood, flooring and related products.

HCVFs are forests whose protection is deemed to be of outstanding and critical importance, which includes both ecological and social values, by the FSC.

Illegal logging is the harvesting, transporting, processing, buying or selling of timber in violation of foreign, tribal, national or international laws. This definition also applies to harvesting wood from protected areas, exporting threatened plant/tree species, and falsifying official documents.