Natural Traces: Natural Traces in forensic investigations - how the analysis of non-human evidence can solve crime

事实上，任何犯罪现场都含有动物、植物、土壤、微生物或环境痕迹。例子包括宠物毛发或唾液、花粉和藻类、土壤和土壤生物如细菌或线虫、真菌孢子、昆虫和任何来源的环境DNA形式的环境痕迹。这样的生物痕迹主要可以在活人身上找到（嫌疑人、受害者）、汽车或武器等物体上的尸体，以及不仅在表面上而且在其周围环境中的尸体，如单坟或万人坑，或水生环境。在欧盟，缺乏研究生水平的法医学应用主题的培训机会，例如对特定的非人类生物痕迹的定性和定量分析。虽然许多欧盟国家都有法医实验室，可以对这些痕迹进行分析，但需要建立一个更广泛的综合知识库，建立在学术界基础研究与法医专家在个案工作中的分析和应用之间的密切合作基础上。自然正义旨在优化非人类痕迹的采集和分析程序，以满足识别嫌疑人和受害者的日益增长的需求，并将痕迹与不同的地点，时间或行动过程联系起来。在此基础上得出的结果需要有统计上的稳健性，这也将在交叉检查的情况下在法庭上得到支持。该提案针对10名具有生命科学背景的博士生。他们将在由学术、非学术合作伙伴和警察学院或实验室提供的培训学校中积累实用法医学方面的知识和经验。训练将生物证据嵌入贝叶斯框架中，通过应用新颖的概率方法从元数据中提取法医有用信息，使其与所有其他形式的证据具有普遍可比性。它是真正跨部门的，可以借调培训用户（例如警察部队），并由不同国家的PI进行联合监督。

Literally any crime scene contains animal, plant, soil, microbial or environmental traces. Examples include pet hairs or saliva, pollenand algae, soil and soil organisms like bacteria or nematodes, fungal spores, insects, and environmental traces in the form ofenvironmental DNA of any origin. Such biological traces can be found mainly on living people (suspects, victims), on objects like carsor weapons, and on bodies not just on the surface but also in their surroundings like single or mass graves, or an aquatic environment.In the EU, there is a lack of training opportunities in applied topics of forensic science at postgraduate level, such as the qualitativeand quantitative analysis of specifically such non-human biological traces. While many EU countries have forensic laboratories thatalso such traces, a much broader, integrated knowledge base is needed, built on close cooperation between basic research inacademia and analysis and application in casework by forensic specialists. NATURAL JUSTICE aims to optimise the procedures fortaking and analysing non-human traces in order to meet the ever-increasing demands for identifying suspects and victims and to linktraces to different places, times or courses of action. The results based on this need a statistical robustness that will also hold up in thecourtroom under cross-examination.The proposal aims for 10 PhD students with a background in life sciences. They will build their knowledge and experience in practicalforensics in training schools provided by academic, non-academic partners, and police academies or laboratories. The trainingembeds biological evidence in a Bayesian framework, making it universally comparable with all other forms of evidence, by applyingnovel probabilistic approaches to extract forensic useful information from metadata. It is truly cross-sectoral, with secondments atend-users of the training (e.g. police forces) and joint supervision by PIs from different countries.