Genomic tools for traceability: Opportunities, challenges and perspectives for the Canadian forestry sector

Consumers, retailers, investors, and governments want quality products that are both safe and obtained through legal and sustainable practices. The solution put into place to meet those challenges requires the implementation of a traceability system. In the context of forestry, traceability is the ability to inform about the identity or provenance of a wood product. The principle of traceability helps establish trust among the various stakeholders throughout the value chain. To this day, most traceability systems are based on paper permits, which are easier to falsify than systems that are based on genetic markers. In this manuscript, we define the elements of a traceability system based on genomic tools that could be useful for the Canadian forest sector. We also present several examples in which genomic tools are or could be used as traceability systems. Genomic tools and data happen to be available in quantity for several forest species and they could constitute the basis for the development of such tr...