EUDR cocoa geolocation — TRACES-ready, without rejections

From cooperative export to DDS

Whether the cooperative sends a Shapefile in a local projection, a KML, or an Excel of GPS points, DDSpass reprojects to WGS84, fixes geometry, and flags overlapping or duplicate plots so the same land is not declared twice.

Catch the silent errors

Some files TRACES accepts but with wrong data — an area read as 0, coordinates in the wrong country. DDSpass surfaces these before you submit. Everything runs locally in your browser.

Plots mapped around a homestead

Walking a cocoa farm boundary with a phone usually means walking around something as well — the compound, a stream, a patch left uncleared. Whatever is excluded becomes an interior ring, and such a polygon is one of only two things TRACES visibly refuses: Polygon with holes are not accepted by the system.

Where the ring is not refused, the outcome is worse: the interior is ignored and the whole outer boundary counts as production area — in testing, roughly 100.4 hectares of actual planting became a declared 119.11. DDSpass finds interior rings before upload, resolves them into one declared boundary, and names every affected plot in the fix report.

The same farm, mapped twice

Cocoa plot registers are built up over seasons by different hands, so duplicates are structural rather than careless. TRACES does not test for them: two records covering the same ground import cleanly, and the same hectares are declared twice.

• Two buying agents mapping the same farm in different seasons.
• A farmer registered with more than one cooperative or society.
• A plot re-walked after a boundary dispute, with the old trace never removed.
• An inherited farm split between family members but still recorded once as a whole.

DDSpass compares plots against each other — catching identical and nested plots as well as partial overlaps — and can merge a connected group into one boundary, recalculating the hectares from the merged shape rather than carrying over the first plot's figure.

When the register and the map disagree

The cooperative's book says 2.4 hectares; the traced boundary computes 3.1. Import reads both the geometry and the Area value from your file, so a gap between them travels straight into the declaration. It matters most around the 4-hectare mark, where a register figure of 3.8 and a polygon of 4.3 are two different situations.

DDSpass flags a polygon whose computed area contradicts the declared one and shows the recalculated figure, so the mismatch becomes your decision rather than the file's. A computed area that looks far too small is usually a geometry fault: a self-intersecting boundary — a GPS trace that crosses itself — collapsed to 0.01 hectares in testing where the true plot was 239.09.

Questions

TRACES says polygons with holes are not accepted. What do I do?

The plot carries an interior ring — usually a homestead, stream or uncleared patch excluded while the boundary was walked. Where such a ring does get through instead, the hole is counted as production area. DDSpass resolves it before export and records the change in the supplier report.

Will TRACES notice if two agents mapped the same farm?

No. Overlapping and duplicate plots import with no warning, and the same land ends up declared twice. The comparison has to happen before submission — DDSpass runs it across the whole file and can merge a connected group into one boundary, with the area recomputed.

Do I declare the area from our register or from the polygon?

That is a decision for your own compliance process, but the two should not silently disagree. DDSpass compares the declared area with the area computed from the boundary and reports the recalculated value. It also makes sure the exported figure is a number — an area written as text is read as 0 hectares.

The country field is empty after import. Is the file wrong?

Not necessarily. Whether TRACES reads ProducerCountry depends on the entry point: the top-level Import button does, while Add production place → Import GeoJSON does not. Check the code is valid ISO2 too — UK belongs as GB, EL as GR.