EUDR palm oil geolocation — TRACES-ready, without rejections

Plantations and smallholders

A mill's supply mixes estate blocks with thousands of smallholder plots. DDSpass reprojects Shapefiles to WGS84, validates each plot, and flags overlapping or duplicate plots so the same land is not declared twice across an aggregated supply base.

Catch the silent errors

Some files TRACES accepts but with wrong data — an area read as 0 ha, coordinates in the wrong country, a self-intersecting boundary that collapses the area. DDSpass surfaces these before you submit. Everything runs locally in your browser.

Estate GIS, local projections and the WGS84 rule

Plantation boundaries normally leave an estate GIS or survey department in a national grid — metres on a projected system, not degrees. TRACES needs WGS84 decimal degrees written [longitude, latitude]. Drop a zipped Shapefile into DDSpass and the .prj is read and the geometry reprojected; coordinates that are plainly raw metres get flagged, not passed off as degrees.

Block identifiers are the other half of the job. ProducerName, ProducerCountry, ProductionPlace and Area are a case-sensitive whitelist, so an estate export labelling its column Block_ID or producername loses the value. DDSpass maps recognisable columns onto the four accepted keys and reports every rename — Shapefile to EUDR GeoJSON covers the conversion.

Detailed estate boundaries and the 25 MB ceiling

A DDS is capped at 25 MB. Blocks digitised from imagery or traced by machine carry thousands of vertices each, so a full mill supply base clears that ceiling long before the plot count looks unusual.

DDSpass shrinks the file in two stages. It first removes collinear vertices, which does not change the shapes at all. If the file is still too large it simplifies, raising the tolerance step by step while holding area drift under 0.5% and reporting how many points went. If it still will not fit, you get the official split-DDS instructions.

Trimming precision pays off twice: coordinates are rounded to six decimals, and vertices colliding after rounding become duplicates in the ring — nine-decimal machine traces produce them routinely.

Estates, schemes and blocks declared twice

A mill's supply base is usually two datasets — company estates, and the scheme or outgrower smallholders feeding the same mill — built by different people at different times. The same block turning up in both is common, and TRACES imports both copies with no message. What to reconcile before submitting:

• Blocks that overlap a neighbour, and blocks sitting entirely inside another.
• Identical duplicates appearing in both the estate list and the scheme list.
• Set-asides mapped as an interior ring — the one geometry TRACES visibly rejects.
• Self-intersecting boundaries from a bad trace, which collapse the reported area.
• Area values typed as text, which import quietly as 0 hectares.

Interior rings deserve their own warning on palm. Riparian buffers and set-asides are frequently punched out of a mapped block, and TRACES answers Polygon with holes are not accepted by the system. Where such a file does get through, the ring is ignored and the whole outer boundary counts as production — in one acceptance-server test, 119.11 ha against a true net of about 100.4 ha. Full write-up.

Questions

Is palm oil covered by the EUDR?

Yes. Oil palm is one of the seven EUDR commodities; each plot needs geolocation in the Due Diligence Statement, and plots over 4 ha must be sent as mapped field boundaries.

Our estate boundaries are in a national grid, not latitude and longitude. Do we have to reproject them first?

No. Zip the Shapefile with its .prj and DDSpass reads the projection and reprojects the geometry to WGS84 for you. Where coordinates arrive as raw metres with no projection information, the file is flagged rather than silently treated as degrees — read as degrees, metre values fall outside the world entirely.

Can we keep a conservation set-aside as a hole inside the block boundary?

No. A polygon with interior rings is one of only two things TRACES visibly rejects, warning Polygon with holes are not accepted by the system. DDSpass strips the ring and flags the plot so you can decide what to declare. Note the other half: where a hole slips through, it is ignored and the whole outer boundary counts as production area.

The consolidated mill supply base is over 25 MB. What are the options?

Let DDSpass shrink it first — collinear vertices go without changing the shapes, then simplification runs under a 0.5% area guard. If the file still exceeds 25 MB the tool shows the official split-DDS instructions; one file per producer (Type I) is usually the cleanest way under the limit.