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OCEANS

PORTFOLIO OF SELECT CURRENT & RECENTLY COMPLETED PROJECTS:

Oceans Anchor

Supply Chain Traceability, Data Validation and Verification, Regulatory Policy Analysis, and Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing

  • Researcher and co-author of an internal paper for the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST), on both theoretical and practical considerations related to developing industry-wide validation and verification norms and best practices for seafood traceability and supply chain data.

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  • Initially contracted by World Wildlife Fund, with subsequent funding from the US IUU Fishing and Labor Rights Coalition for updates, to analyze the value of seafood imported into the US requiring Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) documentation to aid decision-making for further phases of US government implementation of SIMP.  White paper evaluating US SIMP policy forthcoming. 

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Trade of Russian King Crab & US Imports of King Crab

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  • Technical lead on a partnership with a US importer of Russian king crab to produce a supply chain risk assessment and develop traceability pilot of Russian king crab from harvest vessel to US import

  • Worked together with WWF US, WWF Russia, and WWF Korea staff and representatives from the US company and staff of companies involved in the supply chain in Korea, Japan, and Russia

  • Summary report published as  "Case Study on Russian King Crab Sourcing and Traceability Pilot" by " J. Simeone, N. Aeschliman, and J. Steinmetz (authors' names withheld in publication)

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Russia and USA Wild Salmon Conservation & Trade

© Courtesy of WWF. J. Simeone pictured center (orange jacket), Hanson Creek, Bristol Bay, AK

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  • Contracted by World Wildlife Fund's Arctic Field Office to help achieve WWF's long-term objectives for wild salmon

  • Coordinated closely with  WWF Russia's Kamchatka Field office & WWF US' Arctic Field Office in Anchorage

  • Analyzed Russian trade data to identify supply chains of companies with Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Certification

  • Mutli-stakeholder spatial planning of fishing industry-supported marine protected area (MPA) in Kamchatka, in collaboration with The Natural Capital Project

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Peer-Reviewed Publications 

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  • Gephart, J.A., Maxson, P., Simeone, J. et al. Existing seafood traceability tools are insufficient for enforcing import restrictions. npj Ocean Sustainability 4, 6 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44183-025-00103-y

FORESTS

Forests Anchor

US Imports of Hardwood & Engineered Oak Flooring from China

  • Contracted by World Wildlife Fund (Washington, DC) for analysis of international trade data to identify patterns of US wood imports that may be at potentially higher risk for containing illegally harvested Russian-origin Mongolian oak (Quercus mongolica) now listed on CITES Appendix III

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  • Technical lead on a partnership with a US company to conduct a supply chain risk assessment for Company's oak flooring manufacturing in China

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Supply Chain Risk Analysis and US Lacey Act Due Care Guidance

  • Supply chain risk assessments and risk mitigation guidance procedures for sourcing specific wood and forest products

  • Expertise in Russian forest policy and forest products trade

  • On behalf of WWF-US, co-organized conference in St. Petersburg, Russia in October 2016 for Russian forestry and trade companies in order to discuss, strengthen, and build support for Russia's recent domestic advances (including, Law 415 - "The Roundwood Act") to track wood and forest products from forest to export in order to combat illegal logging  

    • Conference Information in English & in Russian (PDF), and Post-Conference Recommendations (PDF)

    • Presented a detailed case study of the Feb. 2016 US Dept. of Justice Lacey Act case against Lumber Liquidators, involving illegal harvest and trade of Russian oak. Case study included explanation of supply chain players implicated, including the specific Russian companies, as well as a detailed explanation of the US DOJ court-approved Environmental Compliance Plan and Due Care procedures that Lumber Liquidators must follow:

Policy Analysis of Myanmar's 2014 Log Export Ban

  • Contracted by Forest Trends (Washington, DC) to analyze the political economy of Myanmar's April 2014 law to ban the export of raw logs and implications for both its domestic processing industry and domestic initiatives to stop illegal logging of teak and illicit log trade between Myanmar and China

Research and Support for Wood Identification Technologies

  • Contracted by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to coordinate with partner organizations and build support for emerging technologies used to identify the origin and species of wood and forest products, for example wood anatomy, DNA/genetics, and chemical analysis (stable isotopes & DART time-of-flight mass spectrometry) as a way to strengthen transparency and provide a tool for companies that seek to verify commodity supply chains and supplier information

  • Lead point of contact on behalf of WWF to work with World Resources Institute (WRI) to plan and co-lead a two day workshop “The Seattle Dialogue: Development and Scaling of Innovative Technologies for Wood Identification” in February 2017 to explore the ways in which emerging technologies for wood identification can more effectively contribute to combating illegal logging and associated trade

  • Co-organizer of a multi-stakeholder meeting (March 2017) to gauge interest in creating an interdisciplinary academic center in partnership with NGOs, federal and state agencies, and multinational companies in order to research global trade and transnational organized crimes involving natural resources, which lead to the formation of the University of Washington's Center for Environmental Forensic Science (CEFS). 

  • Researcher and consultant on ongoing research projects with Dr. Naren Ramakrishnan (Virginia Tech Professor of Computer Science) and World Forest ID to develop machine learning approaches to aid sampling location and identification accuracy origin-provenance identification using Stable Isotope Ratio Analysis (SIRA).

Peer-Reviewed Publications 

  • Yousuf, R.B., H.A. Just, S. Xu, B. Mayer, V. Deklerck, J. Truszkowski, J. C. Simeone, J. Saunders, C.-T. Lu, R. Jia, and N. Ramakrishnan. forthcoming in Proceedings from AAAI 2026 Innovative Applications of AI. Optimizing Product Provenance Verification using Data Valuation Methods. The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Singapore 2026. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15177v3 

  • Sarkar, S., Yousuf, R. B., Wang, L., Mayer, B., Mortier, T., Deklerck, V., Truszkowski, J., Simeone, J. C., Norman, M., Saunders, J., Lu, C.-T., & Ramakrishnan, N. 2025. Chasing the Timber Trail: Machine Learning to Reveal Harvest Location Misrepresentation. Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3711896.3737201  

  • Lee, C. A. Neeser, S. Xu, J. Katyan, P. Cross, S. Pathakota, M. Norman, J. Simeone, J. Chandrasekaran, N. Ramakrishnan. 2025. Can an LLM find its way around a Spreadsheet? TradeSweep: TradeSleuth’s Data Cleaning Module. 2025 IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/icse/2025/056900a638/251mGdNO8uY ​​​​

  • Datta D, Simeone JC, Meadows A, Outhwaite W, Keong Chen H, Self N, Walker L, Ramakrishnan N. (2025) Combating trade in illegal wood and forest products with machine learning. PLOS ONE 20(1): e0311982. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0311982 

  • Truszkowski, J., R. Maor, R. Yousuf, S. Biswas, C. Chater, P. Gasson, S. McQueen, M. Norman, J. Saunders, J. Simeone, N. Ramakrishnan, A. Antonelli, and V. Deklerck. 2025. A machine learning approach to estimating the geographical origin of timber. Ecological Applications. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.3077 

  • Richardson, S.B., J.C. Simeone, and V. Deklerck. 2023. The Global Wood Species Priority List: A Living Database of Tree Species Most At Risk For Illegal Logging, Unsustainable Deforestation, And High Rates Of Trade Globally. Wood and Fiber Science 55(1): 31-42. https://wfs.swst.org/index.php/wfs/article/view/3215 

  • Datta, D., N. Self, J. Simeone, A. Meadows, W. Outhwaite, N. Elmqvist, and N. Ramakrishnan. 2023. TimberSleuth: Visual Anomaly Detection with Human Feedback for Mitigating the Illegal Timber Trade. Information Visualization.   https://doi.org/10.1177/14738716231157081 

  • Datta, D., S. Muthiah, J. Simeone, and A. Meadows. 2021. Scrutinizing Shipment Records To Thwart Illegal Timber Trade.     Outlier Detection and Description Workshop, ACM SIGKDD 2021. https://oddworkshop.github.io/assets/papers/7.pdf 

  • Datta, D., M.R. Islam, N. Self, A. Meadows, J. Simeone, W. Outhwaite, C. Hin Keong, A. Smith, L. Walker, and N.
    Ramakrishnan. 2020. Detecting Suspicious Timber Trades. Proceedings from the Thirty-Second Conference
    on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-20). New York, New York. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i08.7032

  • Wiedenhoeft AC, J. Simeone, A, Smith, M. Parker-Forney, R. Soares, et al. 2019. Fraud and misrepresentation in retail forest products exceeds U.S. forensic wood science capacity. PLOS ONE 14(7): e0219917. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.021991

  • Newell, J.P. and J. Simeone. 2014. “Russia’s forests in a global economy: how consumption drives environmental change.” Eurasian Geography and Economics. 55(1): 37–70. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15387216.2014.926254

  • Simeone, J. 2013. “The Russian Forest Sector and International Trade in Forest Products.” Vestnik: The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies. Issue 13: 3-29. https://geohistory.today/russia-forest-sector-wto/ 

  • Simeone, J. 2012. "Timber export taxes and trade between Russia and China: Development of the forestry sector in the Russian Far East." The Forestry Chronicle. 88 (5): 585-592. https://pubs.cif-ifc.org/doi/10.5558/tfc2012-110

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Other Articles/Publications 

GEOPOLITICS & TRADE

Geopolitics Anchor

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  • Contracted by Foreign Policy Research Institute's Rensselaer Lee (Philadelphia, PA & Washington, DC) as a research analyst to collect, synthesize, and analyze Russian- and English-language literature and data for the manuscript  "Russia’s Far East: New Dynamics in Asia Pacific and Beyond" by Rens Lee (Foreign Policy Research Institute) and Artyom Lukin (Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia). Book published December 2015- available on Amazon.com:                                          http://www.amazon.com/Russias-Far-East-Dynamics-Pacific/dp/1626373892/​

    • Book review (PDF) -  Gould-Davies, N. (2016). Book Review: Russia’s Far East: new dynamics in Asia Pacific and beyond. By Rensselaer Lee and Artyom Lukin. International Affairs, 92(4), 1012–1013. doi:10.1111/1468-2346.12678 ​

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