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They acknowledge it : > “there would be a need to differentiate effects from human decomposition with those from other animals' decomposition.” But then : >
by jmnicolas 6y ago
They acknowledge it :
> “there would be a need to differentiate effects from human decomposition with those from other animals' decomposition.”
But then :
> However, there could be subtle differences in how plants respond to the decomposition of different kinds of mammals.
I really think it's a long shot and the number of false positive would make the technique impractical, unless you know there's a human body in this forest and you want to exhaust all possibilities to find it.
- leoc 6y agoOTOH, in the circumstances where someone is looking for the body of a fairly-recently-deceased human in a forest they're probably motivated enough to search through quite a large number of false positives to find it. And if the search finds, or can be made to find, only largish mammal corpses then you'd tune out the many dead crows and squirrels and the like. Relatedly, I wonder if the technique might be more effective in the earthwormless parts of North America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_A... ?
- martyvis 6y agoTIL done temperate parts of the world don't have earthworms
- ConsiderCrying 6y agoThe article kind of ends up not giving a conclusive answer to the question posed in the headline though, just a pet peeve of mine. It's really more about the possibility of a new technology helping and even that, as you've said, is a murky option. The best way to use something like this is probably to find the remains if the murderer confesses and says they're buried "somewhere" in a certain forest. But that's such a niche use case.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoFalse positives are exactly why certain elements of society love this sort of thing.