[[quoteright:190: [[Webcomic/{{xkcd}} https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/gps_evidence.png]]]]
->''"I see you found the crumb. I '''knew''' you wouldn't notice the enormous flag."''
-->-- '''Negaduck''', ''WesternAnimation/DarkwingDuck'', "Just Us Justice Ducks, Part 1"

So your investigation seems to have hit a dead end. Either you have [[FingerprintingAir no prints]], or you stumbled across a RedHerring, either way the situation seems hopeless...

But wait! The guys at the lab have found the clue you were looking for! Turns out some of the trace in the crime scene is a rare plant that can only be found in a certain part of your town! Or sand that comes from a specific island that one of the suspects has visited recently! Either way, now you're certain where to go. The Lab Rats have stumbled across GPS Evidence.

GPS Evidence is able to pinpoint a certain geographical location with amazing accuracy. It points straight to either the location the heroes are trying to find, or the person they are seeking (if said person was the only person who visited the place that the evidence pinpoints).

While this can border on DeusExMachina if done badly, the RealLife examples show that there is some TruthInTelevision to it. Usually goes hand in hand with SherlockScan. But compare SherlockCanRead if what you actually found was a piece of ''text'' labeling the thing's location.

----
!!Examples:

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
* Used a couple of times in ''Manga/JojosBizarreAdventureStardustCrusaders''. First, the actual adventure is kicked off when Star Platinum spots an insect native to Egypt in Joseph's psychic photo of Dio. Once in the country, the group acquires a photo of Dio's mansion and asks around to find its location, attracting the attention of one of Dio's henchmen who later admits to their destination being in lower Cairo.
** In the manga, the photo is also given to a (professional) beggar who does manage to find the mansion on his own. [[spoiler:He's picked off by another of Dio's subordinates before the information can be relayed.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Comic Books]]
* Done too often to list by Franchise/{{Batman}}. Gotham City must have some truly bizarre geology given the number of soil types unique to one area of the city.
* Spoofed in ''ComicBook/SupermanAndBatmanGenerations'' in the chapter depicting the eponymous heroes' first meeting in 1929. Superboy uses his microscopic vision to analyze a crate for clues while Robin (Bruce Wayne) says that they can track the sender using Superboy's findings. At this point, Lois Lane names the crate's exact point of origin... [[SherlockCanRead by reading it off the shipping label]].
* ''ComicBook/StarWarsDarthVader'': Vader arranges for funds confiscated by the Empire to be "lost" in transit so he can use them to fund his own agenda. Not only does General Tagge realize the money was stolen and order [[HiredToHuntYourself Vader himself]] to find the one responsible, but Vader's new adjutant, Inspector Thanoth, deduces Vader was on a nearby moon at the time of the theft. How? The slight ionization of surface dust on his armor.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Fan Works]]
* ''Fanfic/TriptychContinuum'': In ''Glimmer'', one of the oddities about Lynchpin's corpse is a specific kind of rash caused by exposure to the oils of the flamethorn tree, which only grows wild in a few countries in Menajeria's southern hemisphere.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Films — Animation]]
* Downplayed in ''WesternAnimation/Cars2'' where a special piece of evidence clues Mater into the identity of the BigBad. [[spoiler:After the Lemons bolt a bomb into his air filter to try and kill [=McQueen=], he gets a EurekaMoment after Guido fails to remove the bomb since they used an old brand of bolts which have an unconventional size that don't match many common tools, Mater realises that these were the same brand of bolts used by the Lemons' leader which combined with his oil-leaking incident in Japan, leads him to correctly deduce it's Sir Miles Axelrod after he threatens to blow both of them up unless he disarms the bomb.]]
* In ''WesternAnimation/TheGreatMouseDetective'', a MouseWorld version of ''Sherlock Holmes'', the combination of three substances on a piece of paper are used to pinpoint a villain's hangout, the only bar (brandy) located where the sewer (coal dust) meets the river front (salt water). It could of course have been dropped by a coal deliveryman who'd treated himself to a QuickNip and bought a bag of chips on his way home from work, but hey.
* In Disney's ''WesternAnimation/{{Mulan}}'', Shan-Yu's falcon brings him a doll from a village to which they are ''en route.'' The doll has evidence on it — pine tar, a white horse hair, and sulphur from cannons — that tells him the location of the village and that the Imperial Army are there.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Films — Live-Action]]
* In ''Film/AceVenturaWhenNatureCalls'', Ace gets shot by multiple darts and suspects the darts are being shot by the Wachootoo tribe. After the scene with the tribe, he gets shot again and finds out the Wachootoo dart didn't match the original darts. Ace discovers the original dart was carved from a "red, fungus-bearing acala" which is grown only in one area in the jungle where the bat-nappers are hiding.
* In ''Film/AustinPowersTheSpyWhoShaggedMe'', Austin finds the location of Dr. Evil's lair due to a specific plant found in Fat Bastard's stool sample.
* In ''Film/CharliesAngels2000'', one of the Angels hears a bird call on a tape sent by the bad guys, and recognizes it as a species that only lives on one very small island. Except she identifies it as a pygmy nuthatch, which isn't even close to rare, and lives pretty much everywhere in California.
* In ''Film/FastAndFurious'', Dom looks at the crash scene where [[spoiler:Letty (allegedly) died]], and finds ash of a peculiar color which he recognizes as coming from a meth-nitro afterburner system. That part is fairly plausible since as a former champion street racer, he would know a lot about exotic car modifications. But from that clue, he then immediately figures out exactly what garage the person responsible for the crash went to. This despite the fact that 1: The idea that there is literally only one mechanic willing to do a particular car mod in a region as heavily populated as the LA Metro area is ridiculous, and 2: Since Dom hadn't been to LA in five years, even if it had been true when he last lived there, there was a good chance it wasn't true now. It still works.
* In ''Film/ForceOfNatureTheDry2'', the nest of fruit bats the women disturbed allow Aaron and Ian to work out which of the dozens of possible valleys they had actually entered.
* In ''Film/TheFugitive'', Gerard and his men get a wiretap recording of Kimble calling his lawyer. As they listen, Henry and another marshal hear the sounds of an elevated train in the background. This helps them narrow down his location to cities with such trains. [[EnhanceButton Enhancing the tape]] provides them with a specific city when they discover a PA system in the background announcing "Next stop: Merchandise Mart," telling Gerard and his men that Kimble is back in Chicago.
* In ''Film/JackTheRipper1976'', the pine needle found clutched in the dead woman's hand comes from an Indian species; the only examples of which in London are in Kensington Gardens. This tallies with the scent the blind man Mr. Bridger had smelled on Jack.
* ''Franchise/JamesBond'' knows to search the Amazon jungle for Drax's secret base in ''Film/{{Moonraker}}'' -- it's where the specific orchid used in Drax's neurotoxin came from.
* In ''Film/TheKingsMan'', Oxford is able to find the Shepherd's hideout when he takes a cashmere scarf worn by the captured Mata Hari to the Kingsmen tailors, who identify the wool as coming from a rare breed of goat only found in a specific region of Scotland.
* ''Film/TheNakedGun'':
** Parodied in the series when the scientist involved outlines his plan to do an exhaustive study and analysis of the city's soil sample from a footprint found at the crime scene. When the police tell him that they don't have time for him to run his tests, the scientist helpfully suggests getting the criminal's address from the driver's license in his wallet, also found at the crime scene.
** And again when Ted the lab guy tries to analyze the wood fiber in a message from their suspect and determines that it came from a specific tree found only in one region and used as raw material in only one paper mill. The trail unfortunately went cold from there, so it's a good thing the message had their suspect's address on the letterhead, eh?
* In the Bond parody ''Film/OurManFlint'', Flint is able to track [[NebulousEvilOrganisation Galaxy]] to Marseilles through trace quantities of garlic, saffron and paprika left on a dart used by a Galaxy agent in a ratio that he somehow knows is only used in bouillabaisse, and only in restaurants in Marseilles.
* Creator/GuyRitchie's ''Franchise/SherlockHolmes'' films have variants of this trope.:
** In the [[Film/SherlockHolmes2009 first film]], members of the Temple of the Four Orders bail Holmes out of jail. As soon as Holmes gets in, a man apologetically puts a bag over his head. When it's removed, Holmes is sitting in front of Sir Thomas in the Temple's headquarters.
--->'''Sir Thomas:''' Mr. Holmes, apologies for summoning you like this. I'm sure it's quite a mystery as to where you are, and who I am... \\
'''Sherlock Holmes:''' As to where I am? I was, admittedly, lost for a moment, between Charing Cross and Holborn, but I was saved by the bread shop on Saffron Hill. The only baker to use a certain French glaze on their loaves -- a Brittany sage. After that, the carriage forked left, then right, and then the tell-tale bump at the Fleet Conduit. And as to who you are, that took every ounce of my not-inconsiderable experience. The letters on your desk were addressed to a Sir Thomas Rotherham. Lord Chief Justice, that would be the official title. Who you really are is, of course, another matter entirely. Judging by the sacred ox on your ring, you're the secret head of the Temple of the Four Orders in whose headquarters we now sit, located on the northwest corner of St. James Square, I think. As to the mystery, the only mystery is why you bothered to blindfold me at all.
** Holmes determines from trace clues on Lord Coward's clothing what he's done and the fact that he's been helping Blackwood set up a machine in the sewers to assassinate Parliament.
** In the [[Film/SherlockHolmesAGameOfShadows second film]], when looking at some letters that Simza's brother Rene has sent her, Holmes and Watson notice that they are of the stock used by a printing press, and are musty, as if stored in a damp place. A wine stain on one of the sheets allows Holmes to conclude that they were from a wine cellar near a printing press, which is how they locate the anarchist leader Claude Ravache.
* ''Franchise/StarWars Episode II: Film/AttackOfTheClones'' has a perfectly sensible example, as pinpointing which planet a rare weapon came from is quite a lot easier than it seems.
* Referenced in the film of ''Film/VForVendetta''. V says he can't let Evey leave because though she was unconscious when he brought her to his home, she's seen the color of the stone in the underground lair, and the government would be able to find him with that information.
* In ''Film/PineappleExpress'', [[TheHero Dale]] sees [[BigBad drug lord Ted]] kill a man and go on the run, leaving behind a roach of marijuana at the scene. This roach is full of a very rare kind of marijuana named "[[TitleDrop Pineapple Express]]", only sold by Ted, and who sold it to only one dealer in the entire valley -- Saul, Dale's friend. Half an hour later, Dale ''and'' Saul barely escape with their lives when Ted's goons come kicking down the door.
* In ''Film/{{Room}}'', a cop is dealing with Jack, a traumatized boy who has just escaped his kidnapper and now has lost his way in a totally alien environment. While Jack is completely disoriented and convinced he has lost his one chance to help his mother, the cop is able to get from him a handful of vital clues: the trip he had in the kidnapper's truck made three stops, and he and his mother were held in a shack with a skylight. The cop concludes that Jack's mother must likely be in a three-block vicinity in a small building with a distinctive and easy-to-spot roof feature. With that information, the police are able to rescue Ma that night.
* ''Film/SirArthurConanDoylesSherlockHolmes'': After the mechanical dinosaurs blow up the rubber factory, Holmes finds a pebble clinging to the owner's body which, because of its lack of singeing, had to have become attached to his clothes immediately before he was flung through the window. It is a type of rock found in only one place in Britain, which happens to be near Holmes' boyhood home. [[spoiler:Given we later learn that the BigBad is Sherlock's brother, it is entirely possible it was placed there deliberately for Sherlock to find.]]
* In ''Film/WhiteSands'', a bit of carpet fuzz on a body found in the desert is traced to the motel where he was staying.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Literature]]
* Not uncommon in Creator/EllisPeters' ''Literature/BrotherCadfael'' novels. In ''The Leper of St. Giles'', Cadfael discovers traces of three different varieties of plants on a corpse and surmises that the body was murdered in an area where all three plants grow closely together.
* Quadriplegic Forensic Expert Lincoln Rhyme, from the Jeffrey Deaver novels, seemingly has samples of everything in the city. Most notable in ''Literature/TheBoneCollector'', where he can narrow dirt samples down to a particular building.
* Frequently subverted in the ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' books featuring the Night Watch:
** In ''Literature/{{Thud}}'', Angua smells clay from Quarry Lane, the home of a large part of the Ankh-Morpork troll community down in the dwarf mine. She however remembers Vimes philosophy on clues: "Don't trust them, you could walk around with pockets full of them." It '''is''' a really important clue for that reason, because it tells them a dwarf is trying to frame the trolls.
** In ''Literature/TheFifthElephant'', Reg Shoe remembers Vimes' advice as well when investigating the murder of rubber goods manufacturer Sonky. One must beware of trusting clues too much, otherwise one might find a wooden leg, a pink slipper, and a feather and "hatch up a theory involving a one-legged ballet dancer and a production of ''Chicken Lake''".
** ''Literature/{{Jingo}}'':
*** Klatchian coins and sand in the room of the man suspected for the assassination attempt of the ambassador is supposed to be seen as proof that "Someone in Ankh-Morpork did a bad job trying to frame the Klatchians". It turns out to be "[[spoiler:Klatchians are smarter than Morporkians give them credit for.]]"
*** Played straight: Angua can smell a particular dye on the coat belonging to an assassin (not to be confused with an Assassin) which she knows comes from a specific city and is important in discovering said assassin's identity.
** In ''Literature/FeetOfClay'': Angua and Cheery bring some clay from a crime scene to a pottery hoping that there's lots of different kinds or something, but are disappointed to be told that "It's just clay." [[spoiler:However, double-subverted in that they also learn where it's from in the process, and this turns out to be an important clue.]]
** PlayedWith in ''Literature/{{Night Watch|Discworld}}'', where Vimes is shown to be able to tell where in the city he is by feeling the brickwork on the road through thin-soled boots since he spent decades patrolling the city while wearing cardboard-soled boots.
* A staple of the methods used by Literature/SherlockHolmes. Among them, he's done studies on soil composition on a large radius from London and he can notice and identify tattoo styles from around the world and can pinpoint a perpetrator's whereabouts down to a pretty good range. Given that modern forensics owes something to Holmes (Doyle wrote about fingerprint and blood analysis years before anyone used it for real) it may be a TropeMaker.
* ''Literature/HeraldsOfValdemar'': An artist-slash-assassin in ''Storm Warning'' gives himself away when he mentions the use of a certain pigment in his work — which comes from a mineral found only in the Eastern Empire for which he is TheMole.
* ''K is for Killing'' by Daniel Easterman. During World War 2 a spy is forced to kill an American police officer after landing by submarine in the United States. He throws up afterwards, and an analysis of the stomach contents shows that he was drinking ersatz coffee shortly beforehand, then only used in Europe.
* Deliberately done by the Eco-Killer in ''The Killing Hour'' - he kidnaps two women, one he murders and dumps in an easy-to-find spot and the other he abandons alive in a deadly, remote place. He leaves clues to the living woman's location on the body of the dead woman, as a challenge to see if the detectives can track her down before she dies. These clues are always GPSEvidence, but even so, they often fail to save the second victim.
* ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'':
** In the book ''[[Literature/XWingSeries Isard's Revenge]]'', Iella and Mirax examined a poisoned device that had been implanted in a man and had killed him. They went through computer programs to look up what planets had the facilities to make that sort of highly specific poison.
** Also showed up in the original ''Rogue Squadron'', with stormtrooper corpses from an attack on their temporary base turning out to have rashes caused by a specific minor illness from the Rachuk system, and analysing the DNA showed it to be a very recent strain.
* In ''Literature/TheSumOfAllFears'', scientists are able to examine plutonium fragments left behind from a thermonuclear detonation and identify what reactor it came from. [[spoiler:Which is an important clue, as everyone thought the Russians had exploded the bomb, but it had been made from ''American'' plutonium.]]
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
* ''Series/{{Arrow}}'' just ''loves'' this trope. Apparently, it's super popular for villains in Starling/Star City to hide in abandoned factories that used to be dedicated to manufacturing an exclusive chemical formula that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.
* Abused mercilessly in ''Series/{{Bones}}'', usually resulting from a spore sample analyzed by Hodgins.
* Occasionally used in ''Series/{{Cadfael}}''. Cadfael, the abbey apothecary, knows where and when every plant grows in the Shrewsbury area and has tracked down where people have been, evidence has been, and murders have taken place on the basis of what plant matter is caught up with them.
* Subverted in one episode of ''Series/{{Castle|2009}}''. The victims of the week both have traces of water containing diatoms (single-celled organisms). The forensic tech promises that they can identify the water source, and Castle and Beckett get her to test the water from a single fish tank. [[spoiler: It's not it. Turns out, the water was from the ''harbor''.]]
* ''Series/{{Columbo}}'', more than once.
** In "[[Recap/ColumboS10E02 Caution: Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health]]", Columbo is able to destroy a killer's alibi thanks to the victim's dog. It was friendly and had a habit of scratching at car doors, and is missing a claw on one paw. The killer claims he had never been to the victim's house, yet as Columbo points out, his car door has the dog's distinct claw marks on it.
** In "[[Recap/ColumboS10E03 Columbo and the Murder of a Rock Star]]", Columbo figured out a killer had been in the area of a murder because mulberries, which grow in an area near where the victim lived, had fallen inside the killer's luxury car's hood.
** In "[[Recap/ColumboS10E10 Strange Bedfellows]]", a pivotal piece of evidence turned out to be a dead mouse--specifically, the mouse was found in a Los Angeles restaurant but it turned out to be a breed native to the mountains of Southern California but not the city.
* Done several times on ''Series/{{CSI}}'' and its spinoffs:
** In ''Series/CSIMiami'', the team discovered a missing child's location by traces of a plant found ''only'' in a specific area of the Everglades.
** On ''Series/{{CSINY}}'' a suspect was caught due to sand from a specific island in the Pacific which the suspect had imported to donate to a prestigious pre-school in order to increase the chances of his son getting in.
** Subversion: ''Series/{{CSINY}}'' played a long game with this trope in the fourth season. In the season's first few episodes, a lot of cases were solved using {{GPS Evidence}}. However, in "One Wedding And A Funeral," Stella finds tree bark at a crime scene. She locates the only furniture store in New York that uses wood from that tree, and lo and behold there's someone with a record who works there. But wait! He didn't do anything! The tree bark was actually a clue left by Mac's stalker, intended to lead him to the Tribune Tower in Chicago.
** And of course the ''Series/{{CSI}}'' season five finale, "Grave Danger," when Grissom, Entomologist Extraordinaire, determines Nick's location from the ants in his box since fire ants can only be found in wet fertile soil, which in the Nevada desert means plant nurseries; combining it with the known radius of how far Nick could have gone and the fact the kidnapper's relatives own one, they're able to pin down the spot to send the search and rescue.
** ''Series/{{CSI}}'' used this in a remarkably literal sense in the episode "Fracked." GPS data from a car and cell phone played important parts in the investigation of the title case.
* ''Series/DCIBanks'': In "The Buried," a footprint left behind at the scene of a crime contains the mixture of the chemicals used in match heads. This leads the police to the only old match factory in the area.
* The algae on the rocks ''Series/{{Dexter}}'' used to weigh down his victims help the cops narrow down the list of suspects...
** It helps in that case that they already had a small number of possible marinas to gather samples from and compare the evidence to. It was Dexter's conceit that he kept weighing bodies down using rocks from the marina where he keeps his boat.
* ''Series/DoctorWho'': Used by the Ninth Doctor, of all people, in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E5WorldWarThree "World War Three."]] The Doctor gathers up everything the cast has learned about the Slitheen and is able to use the outer space equivalent of the trope to identify their home planet, thus their species, thus their WeaksauceWeakness.
-->"Narrows it down!"
* Subverted in an episode of ''Series/DueSouth''. Fraser figures out that a man involved in a case is a boxer by means of a SherlockScan. What makes him so certain that he trains in this particular gym? He was wearing a shirt with that gym's name and address on it.
* Barry identifies the location of the villain's lair in the debut episode of ''Series/TheFlash1990'' by identifying several soil samples, and figuring out where they overlap.
* ''Series/TheFreshPrinceOfBelAir'': Brit Geoffrey pinpoints ''exactly'' where in the UK his British date is from after hearing her accent. The only thing he guesses wrong is the floor of the building that she lived on — it's the second, not third.
* ''Film/HaloNightfall'' has Jamieson Locke and his fellow ONI operatives trying to determine the exact source of the primary substance used in a [[ScaryDogmaticAliens Covenant]] bioweapon that only affects humans. They are able to find out that it used a previously unrecorded heavy transuranium element that can only be found on a shard of the Halo ring that Master Chief destroyed in ''VideoGame/HaloCombatEvolved''.
* Subverted in ''Series/InspectorMorse'', when an analyst realises where and when a photo was taken. Morse is positively impressed, and asks 'how on earth did you realise that?' (or something to that effect), only to hear the obvious response: 'it's written on the back'.
* ''Series/JakeAndTheFatman'': In "Rhapsody in Blue", Jake gets sticky sap stuck to the roof of his car when he visits the murder scene. Later, while talking to the garage attendant, the attendant sympathizes and says that he had to clean that sap off the car of one of the suspects twice within 24 hours. Jake realises that the suspect had returned to the scene of the crime after the legitimate visit he had told the police about.
* Done on all versions of ''Franchise/LawAndOrder''. In particular, the ''UK'' version has them realizing that a victim was not killed where he was buried when their forensics expert reveals that the soil samples found on the sheet he was wrapped are from different locations. With this, the detectives realize that their chief witness — the killer's accomplice — is telling the truth.
* Subverted in ''Series/LegendOfTheSeeker'' by a clever villain. Richard, investigating a murder, finds residue from a certain type of plant on one suspect's clothing that implicates him in the murder. After the man is tried, found guilty, and executed, they find out that the ''real'' killer planted it as evidence, counting on Richard to find it.
* ''Series/MacGyver1985'': In "Walking Dead", Mac is able to identify that the cult is using an abandoned dam as their base from the mixture of dried river silt and machine oil on a voodoo doll.
* Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse:
** ''Series/TheDefenders2017'': [[Series/IronFist2017 Danny Rand]] and [[ComicBook/DaughtersOfTheDragon Colleen Wing]], trying to find leads on the Hand, face a setback when Elektra kills a man they have been tracking for months. The man says with his dying breath that the war with the Hand is in New York City. On returning to Manhattan, they determine that the sword the dead man was carrying must have been to an exclusive sword shop that is only located in Manhattan. They travel there and encounter Hand henchmen destroying bodies with acid, and Danny's attempt to rough up Cole for answers leads to him encountering Series/LukeCage2016.
** ''Series/Daredevil2015'': Early in season 2, Matt locates Frank Castle's den and armory by following a blood trail left by a wounded dog he stole from the Kitchen Irish. As he's blind, he has to rely on the smell of the blood and his other senses in order to trace the route.
** ''Series/JessicaJones2015'': Jessica has to rely on various takes on this trope to get clues for cases.
*** When Jessica realizes that Kilgrave has someone taking pictures of her, she initially tries to go to various spots around the city where these pictures have been taken, in order to pinpoint the photographer's position. While on another job, she sees an NYPD surveillance camera and realizes that maybe one of those cameras caught the spy. So she contacts Will Simpson and gives him times and dates from various cameras she's passed, so she can look and see if any faces show up following her in any of them.
*** To track down Kilgrave after he takes control of Luke, Jessica looks through news articles trying to find anything from people who mistook his powers for performance art.
*** Early in season 2, after an encounter with the fake "Dr. Leslie Hansen" (actually [[spoiler:Jessica's mom]]), Jessica realizes that the imposter was wearing a wig made of real human hair. Trish notes it's a pretty high-quality wig as she didn't catch it, and says there are only three wig shops in New York City that make wigs of that quality. The first one they hit (owned by a woman who made wigs for Trish during her ''It's Patsy'' days) recognizes the woman.
** ''Series/Loki2021'': The Kablooie gum the Variant left as an AnachronisticClue was sold in a limited region for a short span of years, narrowing down the Variant's hiding place.
* ''Series/{{Monk}}'':
** In "Mr. Monk and the Three Pies", Adrian's brother Ambrose points out that of course Pat van Ranken's old pickup truck runs, and that it's been to a certain section of the park because it has yellow acorns in the truckbed that only grow in one spot in the park. Impressive knowledge of the local ecology, for a guy who '''never''' leaves his house.
** Subverted in "Mr. Monk and the Genius": Monk realizes that one of the flowers in Patrick Kloster's yard is an oleander plant, and oleander sap can be used to create a poison that imitates the symptoms of a heart attack. He takes it to Stottlemeyer as his primary evidence... only to be immediately shot down because of how common it is.
** Subverted (and possibly parodied) in "Mr. Monk and the Other Detective". Marty Eels, a private investigator who has a loser's reputation, shows up at a jewelry store robbery with all the answers. When the store manager's car is found abandoned on a back road, Marty finds a mosquito on the floor of the car and is able to recognize its species and genus and whatever and point out that it only appears in this one particular place in the city that the body is at. Monk and Natalie eventually determine that he had been faking it and knew where the body was the whole time, as his mother, a quality control operator, had overheard the killers bragging about their crime while on hold to buy plane tickets to flee the country, and told Marty all of the information rather than call the police and turn the guys in.
** Done in a ShowWithinAShow of "Mr. Monk and the TV Star". The ''Series/{{CSI}}'' rip-off ''Crime Scene S.F.'' has a fictional device being used to analyze a fiber that is immediately traced to Colombia and a certain drug cartel that appears to be a recurring villain on the show. Monk is incredulous that people believe that crap. Meanwhile, his police friends don't care, even though they obviously know better, as they're happy to be consultants on the show.
** In "Mr. Monk and the Paperboy", Monk comes across an article in the newspaper about an unrelated murder in Paris where a woman who worked as a curator at the Bastille Prison Museum was found dead with her hands severed. Monk then calls the Paris police and tells them the murderer was her husband. Both he and the victim, his wife, were curators of the Bastille Prison Museum, and he used an old pair of handcuffs from the collection to bind her while he strangled her to death. However, he lost the key to the cuffs, and it would be ungodly obvious to the police who had killed her if her body was found with them still on, which was why he had to cut off her hands.
* ''Series/MyLifeIsMurder'': In "Feet of Clay", Alexa identifies the killer, and then is able to provide the evidence the police need because of the dirt and leaf litter trapped in the killer's shoes that could only have been picked up at the murder scene.
* Parodied in ''Series/PoliceSquad'' when Lieutenant Drebin gets a [[BrokenWindowWarning rock thrown through his window]]. He asks the forensics lab to find out where the rock came from and gets a geology lesson in response. Later on, Drebin confronts the thug who threw the rock, [[StrangeMindsThinkAlike who starts giving the exact same geology lesson]].
* ''Series/{{NCIS}}'' has done this a number of times. Examples include:
** In one episode, the team placed a suspect at the scene of a crime because Abby found silica dioxide and calcium oxide in his shoes. Basically, they found sand and lime, one incredibly, and one reasonably, common substance, and arrested him on that. It helped that they already suspected him, and there was a glass-making company next door to the crime scene, however.
** There was the time Abby tracked Reynosa's movements by tracking bug bites on her dead smuggler's skin... In a matter of hours...
** In the second-season episode "The Good Wives Club", the team got pointed in the right direction when Abby found bits of beetle exoskeleton at a crime scene in Norfolk - a species of beetle that only lives in a small region of Florida.
** In "My Other Left Foot", a seed found on the boot of a dead Marine gets linked to a tree near the suspect's house. More justified than many examples, since individual plants can in fact be identified by their DNA just like humans (or any other organism) can.
** In "Agent Afloat", the team knew to look for a suspect from American Samoa after Abby found traces of a flu virus on a murder victim, and identified it as a strain unique to Samoa.
* ''Series/RizzoliAndIsles'':
** Maura finds a killer by tracking the poison to a flower native to Boston. Of course, the suspect has said flower growing in front of their house.
** Maura does a spectroscopy on a hair left by the killer, which somehow can tell what type of food the hair-bearer ate. This hair was from someone who had recently eaten fermented whale meat, a common dish in Scandinavia. Turns out the victim's assistant had just gotten back from Iceland.
* Used in almost every episode of ''Series/{{Sherlock}}'' although when the eponymous character does it, he normally uses a variety of clues. He makes basically a Venn Diagram of clues, each one corresponding to a few locations, and then sees which location fits them all.
** Played with in "The Blind Banker", where Sherlock meets an acquaintance from the university and tells him that he knows he has recently flown around the world twice. The guy asks if it was some sort of stain from tea that only comes from India. Sherlock calmly replies that he spoke with the guy's secretary. After the meeting, John confronts him about it, as he was there and didn't see Sherlock speaking with the secretary. Sherlock admits that he just wanted to put the guy down and really got the clue from the guy's watch which is two days off.
* On ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' Dr. Bashir's Film/JamesBond holodeck program invokes this trope. He sees a ruby and is able to narrow its origin down to a small geographic area based on what shade of red it is (the redness is directly proportionate to the concentration of chromium ions).
* ''Series/StrangerThings'':
** One of the plot hooks in Season 3 is a strange communication in Russian that Dustin's radio picked up. Steve realises that the call must have been sent from Hawkins, rather than to it, because the music in the background is the same as that played by the kid's amusement facilities in the mall.
* Subverted in an episode of ''Series/TopGear'': The boys are having their used cars examined at a forensics lab to see how their previous owners had treated them. At one point, James tells Jeremy that the techs had discovered that his car had belonged to a Muslim man in Birmingham. Jeremy and Richard are amazed that they were able to find that out just by "squabbing the seats" until James elaborates that they had found a letter from a mosque in Birmingham in the glove box. [[https://youtu.be/wYaXw8TZEvs?t=2m52s Here's the clip.]]
* Played with in an episode of ''Series/ATouchOfFrost'' involved a suspect in a murder whose trainers had been determined to have fragments of glass embedded in the soles. DI Frost then went on to point out to the suspect that Forensics could match the composition of the glass fragments to a specific manufacturer, namely a local glassware firm with a skip full of quality-control rejects quite near where the body had been found. Even if it really is possible to identify the origin of glass fragments that closely this isn't exactly the most damning evidence imaginable, and Frost was merely using it for PerpSweating value.
* Season 2 of ''Series/TheWire'' revolves around the case of the dead women in a shipping container. While [=McNulty=] uses his detective skills -- and the help of tide charts and a mining engineer -- to prove the deaths happened within the juristiction of the Baltimore Police Department, it's less to do with solving the case than to spite his old boss. The investigation into the girls shows they come from Eastern Europe, and many of them recieved breast implants at the same clinic in Budapest, Hungary, but ultimately the leads go cold and despite his efforts, [=McNulty=] fails at his attempt to find the name of the first girl he pulled out the water.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Theatre]]
* In ''Theatre/{{Pygmalion}}'', Henry Higgins can determine a Londoner's address down to the street name by his accent alone. The musical adaptation, ''Theatre/MyFairLady'' downplays it a bit, with Higgins only claiming a precision of "within three streets", and then only for some parts of London.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Video Games]]
* ''Franchise/AceAttorney'':
** Featured in one case when it's necessary to locate a kidnapped spirit medium. The medium channels a spirit that takes note of the surroundings, and is then channeled by another medium to relay the information. Averted in that the clues are vague and not especially useful.
** There's also the [[spoiler: stuffed bear]], which turns out to be really, really rare. Also averted in that Gumshoe tries this trick with the electrical equipment but it doesn't work because you could get that equipment from just about any shop.
* In the Deadshot sidequest of ''VideoGame/BatmanArkhamCity'', Batman finds one of these at the site of the second and third Deadshot killings. Neither of these is useful by itself (Each individually can be found in dozens of places around Arkham City), but there are only three places where ''both'' of the items he found trace samples of can be located, which narrows the search area down enough that he can start investigating.
* This is the point of the Police Officer's story in ''VideoGame/HeavyRain''. Once the evidence is found, the culprit can be tracked. [[spoiler: Final evidence? Figure out the general area, then narrow things down with the evidence you've collected: the location of the owners of a particular type of car, for example, and the flower shops that sell a particular type of flower. At first, the area starts very large, but each piece of evidence narrows it down until finally, you have the last bit of evidence: a particular type of watch specifically given to police officers on their 20th year of service. And in the area you've narrowed down, there's only one police officer who's received that watch...]]
* {{Defied|Trope}} by Futaba in ''VideoGame/Persona5Strikers'' regarding a machine she built to spread their calling card targeted at the Monarch of the Osaka Jail. She's asked afterwards if this will bite them later, but Futaba reassures her team that the machine was entirely built with local junk so the police won't be able to track them outside of Osaka.
* Parodied in ''VideoGame/VampireTheMasqueradeBloodlines'', in which AdventurerArchaeologist Beckett pinpoints the local headquarters of a secret society of vampire hunters by simply examining the hue and texture of a pinch of beach sand, the distinct yet subtle aroma of a whiff of incense, and the testimony of a vampire hunter dangled over a balcony by his ankle.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Comics]]
* In ''Webcomic/AMiracleOfScience'', the police [[http://project-apollo.net/mos/mos041.html use isotope ratios]] to track which planet the raw materials for the bad guy's robots were mined on. He [[http://project-apollo.net/mos/mos225.html anticipated this.]] This sort of analysis is [[http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/scitech/display.cfm?ST_ID=2398 real science]], usually used for classifying meteorites.
* Parodied in [[https://shortpacked.com/comic/rareflower this]] ''Webcomic/{{Shortpacked}}'' strip. One has to wonder why villains don't do this more often.
* ''Webcomic/{{xkcd}}'': Parodied by [[https://xkcd.com/683/ "Science Montage,"]] which contrasts a "[[HollywoodScience Movie Science Montage]]" (lots of lasers and test tubes) with an "Actual Science {{Montage}}" (lots of waiting for a centrifuge). The strip provides the page image.
-->'''Movie Scientist #1:''' Paint flecks from the killer's clothing match an antimatter factory in Belgrade!\\
'''Movie Scientist #2:''' Let's go!\\
---\\
'''Actual Scientist #1:''' Okay, we've determined there's neither barium nor radium in this sample.\\
'''Actual Scientist #2:''' Probably.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Western Animation]]
* ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'':
** One episode made this a little more justifiable: Batman still took a random mud sample, but rather than discovering an obscure location from which it came, he instead discovered that it was part of Clayface... and he's unique.
** In another episode, Batman is able to figure out where Robin's kidnappers have taken him based on the photo of him they left behind as evidence of their action. He recognizes the unique knife type and rope-making technique to a very specific area of the world. [[spoiler:Justified as this is a test of skill fabricated by Ra's Al Ghul to evaluate Batman's detective abilities.]]
* ''WesternAnimation/TheBatman''[='=]s version of Bruce Wayne was also shown occasionally dabbling in this, including tracking down a kidnapped Ethan Bennett to a carnival hideout of the Joker's.
* Subverted in ''WesternAnimation/ChipNDaleRescueRangers''. Gadget performs some chemical tests on a flyer from a travel agency which is the villain's lair, and then she tells her friends the exact address. She read it on the flyer.
* ''WesternAnimation/DarkwingDuck'':
** In "[[Recap/DarkwingDuckS1E19JustUsJusticeDucks Just Us Justice Ducks, Part 1]]", Darkwing deduces the location of Negaduck's hideout from a single bread crumb left at the crime scene -- [[FailedASpotCheck completely failing to notice]] [[FunnyBackgroundEvent the building in the background currently raising a giant flag with Negaduck's face on it]]. Negaduck planted the crumb there on purpose because he knew Darkwing wouldn't notice the flag.
** In "[[Recap/DarkwingDuckS1E48InLikeBlunt In Like Blunt]]", Darkwing presents a grain of sand as their only clue to a case. All of his chemical tests can only reveal that it is indeed a grain of sand, so the Film/JamesBond {{Expy}} tastes it and says that it could only have come from one of several hundred islands... but only ''one'' of those islands didn't have a plant that the villain was deathly allergic to growing there indigenously.
* Done twice in ''WesternAnimation/KimPossible'', first with a rare plant that grows only around one specific waterfall, and again with a rare dog breed that comes from only one breeder in the whole world.
* Played straight in the episode of ''WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb'' where Carl is briefly turned evil by Dr. Doofenshmirtz. Carl is trying to find Perry the Platypus as part of his evil plan and is able to narrow down his location based on an extremely rare flower he sees in the background of Perry's video communicator which only grows in one spot on the entire continent of Africa.
* ''WesternAnimation/SpiderManTheAnimatedSeries'' - When Spider-Man mutates into a bestial "Man-Spider", a post-HeelFaceTurn Kraven the Hunter uses this to track down his lair.
-->'''The Punisher:''' Huh. World Trade Centre parking garage. How did you know?\\
'''Kraven:''' The gravel that I found in Man-Spider's webbing. It still had the scent of gunpowder from [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing that bomb explosion]] of years ago.
* ''WesternAnimation/StarWarsTheCloneWars'': In [[Recap/StarWarsTheCloneWarsS1E17BlueShadowVirus "Blue Shadow Virus"]], a bug is used to pinpoint a hidden Separatist base to a specific part of Naboo.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/SushiPack'' episode "But Is It Art?", while investigating a recent art theft, Kani finds a small piece of granite found only in one region along the coastal mountains. Which she identifies as such on sight.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles1987'' episode "Case of the Hot Kimono", April's famous detective aunt traced a very rare olive oil only found in one island and the only place where it's shipped to.
* In one episode of ''WesternAnimation/TotallySpies'' a villain is tracked down by an unusual shoe print at a crime scene that matches a rare shoe that only three people in the world own. The first, a female basketball player, is crossed off because the spies had seen the perp from a distance and identified him as male. When Jerry continues by identifying [[NonIronicClown a clown]] as the second buyer, he and the girls just share a glance over the communicator before he brings up a scientist as the last one and gives them the address to investigate.
* Done a few times on ''WesternAnimation/WhereOnEarthIsCarmenSandiego'' (the 1990s cartoon). In these cases, they had a bit more credibility, as the clues were often intentional hints left by Carmen for the detectives, and were usually significant enough culturally or historically to be useful: for instance, the idea that Komodo dragons are found on only one island in Indonesia.
%%* [[LampshadeHanging Lampshaded]] in an episode of ''WesternAnimation/WordGirl''. %% ZCE Detected %%
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Real Life]]
* In a real-life case profiled on some TrueCrime show years ago, a killer backed his vehicle into a tree while fleeing the scene. Some seed pods were found in the bed of the suspect's truck. The police managed to DNA match the bean pods to that specific tree. This is an example of how this type of evidence is usually used, to confirm or reinforce a connection that is already known.
** Most likely the program was ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Detectives The New Detectives: Case Studies in Forensic Science.]]'' The show mentions forensic applications of botany and entomology in different episodes. E.g., chiggers were the clincher in one case, being found in only one place in an entire county - the exact place a murderer chose to dump the body of his victim.
** And quite a few times, the police have been able to prove that someone was in a kidnapper's or murderer's car by matching fibers -- either fibers and/or DNA from the body that match those found in the suspect's car or fibers in the car that match clothing worn by the suspect (or both), or fibers found in the interior (either in the back seat area or trunk) that connect to the suspect in some other way. A surprisingly (somewhat) common example is being able to (microscopically) match animal hairs found in the suspect's vehicle to those found on the kidnap/murder victim's pet, particularly if they had a pet dog.
*** This has actually been inverted with the advent of DNA evidence becoming practical - a few old court cases that resulted in convictions (and imprisonment, and in some cases a death sentence) have been overturned because the GPS Evidence excluded the accused, proving their innocence.
* According to Website/TheOtherWiki, during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII sand used in the ballast of Japanese fire balloons was used to determine not only that they were not launched from within the United States, but also which Japanese beaches the sand was taken from.
* Intelligence agents had attempted to locate Osama bin Laden by analysing the background in his videos. They actually succeeded during the Afghan war. However, the Geologist consulted didn't keep his mouth shut, and from then on any tapes smuggled out carefully concealed any background geology.
** This is why putting yourself in front of a green screen or a similar sort of background-blocking screen is recommended when doing live streaming at home or some other private place. Streamers have been doxxed, swatted, and had various forms of harassment come to them in real life because people have been able to track down where they were based on the layout of their home or something else in the background.
* The kidnapping/murder of Bobby Franks, committed by [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_and_Loeb Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb,]] was solved as police found a pair of eyeglasses with an unusual hinge design at the crime scene next to the body. A design so unusual that only '''three''' had been sold in the area, one of which was to Leopold, the younger of the killers. Even worse for Leopold, the police easily dismissed the other two owners as suspects: one was able to show his glasses to the police when they came to question him, and the other guy had been out of town when the murder happened. Leopold tried to dismiss it by saying he dropped them while in the area studying bugs, but this admission proved to be GPS evidence in itself since it tied him to the location where the body was dumped in the first place.
* One bit of an episode of the docu-series ''Extreme Forensics'' had investigators trying to bust a guy's alibi that he was in Ohio with his brother, while he was murdering [[PaterFamilicide his wife (and her mother and their three children)]] in Bakersfield, California. Desperate, because the rental car he had been driving had been washed of much evidence, they turned to trying to identify bug bits that had been caught in the radiator and found a grasshopper leg that was unique to a species in the Sierra Nevada region. Subverted: it didn't break the case but it did show he was lying about where he was.
* Commonly used for investigating bombings or hit-and-runs. Explosives, plastics, and paint have unique markers that let forensic teams figure where they probably came from, even from incredibly small samples. The same goes with the red dye packs used to track bank robbers.
* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckland William Buckland]] (1784 - 1856) is said to have been able to tell during wanderings where exactly he was, just by examining the rocks around him. Not that surprising if you consider that the man was one of the most important geologists (and paleontologists) of his time.
* "Forensic Astronomy" uses the position of the stars to figure out the EXACT time the photo was taken. While it is usually used to, for example, figure out when noted Ansel Adams photos were taken or when a painting was done, there's no reason why it couldn't also be used for photographic evidence in criminal investigations (such as when the last photo taken of a murdered person alive was, if the date on the digital camera is incorrect).
* The documentary ''[[http://www.cosmolearning.com/documentaries/sherlock-holmes-the-true-story-1283/ Sherlock Holmes: The True Story]]'' re-enacts Dr. Joseph Bell telling his class of students that the volunteer arrived through a certain path, based on the reddish-marks on the shoes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by this, and let his Literature/SherlockHolmes character perform the same feat as well.
* The cast of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_(murder_victim) "Adam", a boy whose headless torso was found in the Thames.]] Forensics was able to determine that he was from Nigeria from the contents of his stomach but never found the killer.
* One general example that really is quite specific is isotope analysis. By taking a person's hair samples, it is possible to determine where they have been recently based on the water they have been drinking. The obvious solution to beating this is to only drink bottled water or shave your head. [[RevealingCoverup Though either of those would be somewhat suspicious in and of itself in most cases.]]
** The same general techniques also have been used to analyze drug samples.
* In the 1960 Graeme Thorne kidnapping/homicide case, the body was found with fibers from two different species of cypress and traces of a pink limestone mortar. The police asked postmen if they knew of a house like that and narrowed it down to the killer's house. It is considered a landmark case in Australian police forensics.
* The userbase of Website/FourChan is infamous for its ability to coordinate and track down individuals & locations using this, to the point of being {{Scarily Competent Tracker}}s.
** In the earlier days of the ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' fandom, a {{troll}} started a coordinated bullying campaign against the author of ''Blog/AskPrincessMolestia'', and later fans of the show in general for "[[NoTrueScotsman not being 'proper' fans like she was]]". When said campaign went too far, and one of its followers attempted to have a naturalized citizen ''deported'' in response to his wife criticizing said campaign[[note]][[https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/hmshr6/my_little_pony_battle_of_the_sexes_or_how_to/ this really happened]]; said person won a $50,000 settlement from the person who made the bogus call to ICE[[/note]], 4Chan retaliated by doxxing the troll who started it by using photos on her blog to narrow down the city she was in and then comparing selfies she took in her backyard to images taken from Google Satellite to ''geolocate her home address and post it online''.
** The most famous instance being Creator/ShiaLaBeouf's "He Will Not Divide Us" livestream, in which he raised a flag in protest leading to the most elaborate game of "Capture the Flag" known to man. At one point he attempted to hide it by filming the flag from below with nothing but the sky in view, but 4chan trolls managed to locate the flag in under two days by using astronomy, time zones, and detective work with airline flight paths. When he moved it to a deserted cabin, they found it by examining the wood pattern on the walls. The final location was in front of a blank white wall, which they tracked down to a house in London within four hours by examining how a light from off-screen shifted and eventually dimmed.
** On another occasion, 4chan users managed to pin down the coordinates of a terrorist training camp in southern Aleppo, UsefulNotes/{{Syria}} and [[https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/4dfwdg/4chan_users_coordinate_an_airstrike_on_syrian/ coordinated with a Russian journalist to successfully arrange an airstrike on the location]] using a combination of Google Maps and [[HoistByHisOwnPetard footage from one of their own recruitment videos]].
* Professor Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg provides what is quite probably the UrExample of this trope being used to solve a real-world major crime- A barrel of silver coins being shipped by train across Prussia as part of a major monetary transfer was discovered to have had its contents replaced with rocks and dirt during transport, threatening to stir up an international incident as both sides accused the other of arranging for the shipment to be "lost". Stumped investigators had the bright idea to bring the barrel full of material to the geology department at the University of Berlin, where, by comparing the contents to samples from every station along the train's route, Prof. Ehrenberg was able to identify the exact station where the replacement had to have been made. The loot was soon thereafter recovered from a disgruntled railway worker at said station.
* The group behind the July 2007 bomb attacks in London were caught partly thanks to a rather unlikely variant: The police couldn't find anything useful in the chemical residue left by the explosives themselves because they were homemade, but what they did eventually discover was that the explosive mixture was contained in plastic food containers that turned out to be a rather uncommon brand that was only sold by one wholesaler supplying a relatively small number of retailers. This was enough to narrow down the location of the address where the group prepared the devices to within a mile or so of one of those retailers, and a couple of reports of suspicious activity (people coming and going at odd hours, a strong chemical smell coming from an apartment) did the rest.
* [=GeoGuessr=] puts the player in the position of deducing their location only from a 360 degree Google streetview shot. Skilled players say they can identify locations based on foliage and soil color.
[[/folder]]
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